“Take me to Couer d’Alene, Idaho,” Mom ordered the Witch.
“Go east,” the Witch ordered back.
Mom scrunched up her face. “That’s not a direction. Which way is east?”
“It’s that way. No it's that way. No, just kidding, it’s that way,” the Witch commanded, as if the Wagon were spinning like a top. Except we weren’t moving at all.
“I don’t want to go to a place called Core de Lame,” I said.
Mom ignored me. “Good thing there’s only one way out of here.” She guided the Wagon toward where there was more sky above us than rocks or trees.
“Like I said, go south and then turn left,” the Witch said smugly.
Mom’s eyes narrowed. She leaned closer to the driving wheel and looked both ways. “Turn left on what road?” she asked, as if the Witch could still be trusted.
“Do you see another road?” the Witch asked. “There’s only one, and I told you to go left on it."
Sometimes when we were deep in the wilder-ness, the Witch gave up on place names altogether and called everything left or right just to mess with Mom. Which made Mom especially cranky when there was more than one left, or when right was the wrong left.
“But the pavement stops here. The road on the left is unpaved.” Mom looked back down at the Witch for an explanation.
“If you go left, it takes you in a practically straight line to Idaho,” The Witch showed Mom a frizzy line that looked like a regular line with cartoon electricity running through it. “It’ll only take you three hours and fifty-five minutes. But if you insist on being a big, fat baby who only takes paved roads, you’ll have to go aaaaallllllllll the way around this way, and that’ll take four hours and twelve minutes.”
“When you put it like that...” Mom pinched the Witch’s screen and leaned closer for a better look. “But how long is it unpaved? We can’t go all the way to Idaho without pavement.”
“How the heck should I know?” the Witch scoffed. “I’ve mapped everywhere in the universe. You expect me to keep track of which of those roads you like best, too?”
“You’re right. It can’t possibly be unpaved all the way to Idaho,” Mom decided, forgetting that the Witch didn’t have to follow her orders like the Wagon and I did. She turned the driving wheel toward the dirt and the Wagon started hiking.
“Continue on this road for fifty-eight miles,” the Witch commanded.
“Wait. That doesn’t sound right.” Mom’s eyebrows pinched like they do when she’s trying to hang onto numbers long enough to make them turn into math. “How slow does it think we’re gonna go?”
But dogs and girls can’t do math, so by the time Mom calculated that it meant slow, it was too late to turn back.
The dirt car-trail made popping and crunching sounds under the Wagon’s tires as the forest crept by outside the windows. “Will all this be full of potato orchards when we get to Idaho?” I asked, bouncing around inside the Wagon like I was a chew toy in its mouth.
“Potatoes don’t grow on trees, they grow underground,” Mom said without taking her eyes off the road.
I nodded with satisfaction. “Where all treasures belong.” I’d never buried a bone, but I’d lost them under the couch many times, never to be seen again until Mom cleaned dog-years later, so I knew the joy of discovering buried treasure.
Mom’s head tilted. “Maybe Idaho has places that let you dig for potatoes like farms in Washington let you go apple picking.”
Be still my tail!
“Do you really think they’ll let us dig for potatoes?” I wagged.
“Maybe. What else would we do in all this...” she waved a paw at the thinning forest covering the hills outside every window, “...all this nothing. At least Idaho is skinny at the panhandle so it won’t take too long to get to Montana.”
I took a closer look at all the nothing outside the windows. All around were trees and hills, hills and trees, and nary a sign in the forest. “You don’t...” I gulped. “You don’t think we could get lost out here, do you?”
“Probably not, if there’s a road. All dirt roads lead to pavement eventually. But I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to find your way around before the roads.” She pulled hard on the driving wheel and the Wagon swerved around a rock. When I had my balance again, she continued, “You think the Oregon Trail was hard core? Imagine dragging your canoe through here on foot with no roads, no map, and no common language with the locals.”
I looked out the window and tried to figure out which it was to California. I wouldn’t even know which way to start. “How did they find their way around without roads, and mapps, and riddles written on scraps of paper from the gas station?”
“Lewis and Clark had an indigenous guide named Sacagawea,” she said, pronouncing Lois wrong again. “She knew the area and was a polyglot, so she could trade with the tribes they met along the way.”
“So this is the legendary homeland of the Polyglot tribe,” I said, trying to sound like a scholar who’d heard of them before.
“It just means that she spoke a lot of languages. And she knew things about places the Europeans hadn’t visited before.”
“Like the Witch,” I said, “but nicer.”
“Yeah. The expedition never would have been successful without her. And to think, she could have turned her back on them at any time, or sneakily mistranslated something and double-crossed them. Yet somehow everyone made it back alive.”
“So not like the Witch,” I said.
“Welcome to Idaho” the Witch announced. Outside the windows, nothing changed.
“I thought it would be all farmland, but these are, like, real mountains,” Mom gushed. “One of the reviews even said there were moose up there.”
“I love mooooooos!” I said. Some people call them cows, but I prefer to call them what they call themselves.
“Not moos. Moose. They’re bigger than cows and have these absurdly massive antlers. Like if you made two sporks out of a snow shovel and a pitchfork and stuck them into the ears of an especially oafish horse.”
“I can’t wait to bark at one!” I panted. “Is it true they hang out with squirrels?”
“I’m pretty sure the squirrel thing is just a myth. The only thing I know about wild moose is that they’re so tall that they can fall on the roof and crush you if you hit one with your car”
“It’s only fair,” I said. “You’re just supposed to moo at them through the window, not hit them."
Mom looked down at the Witch in her lap. “Sheesh. That pavement had better come soon. The GPS seems to think we can go 30 miles per hour on this road, but we’re only going 15. It’ll take all day at this rate.”
“This must be exactly what it was like for Lois and Clark when they made this journey,” I said.
“Lewis and Clark,” Mom repeated, pronouncing it wrong.
I tried to picture what a troop hauling their canoe through these mountains might see if there were no road. “What happens if you hit a moose with a canoe?”
“It doesn’t end well.”
“For the moose or the canoe?”
When the sun was low enough that the shadow of a rabbit’s ears could stretch all the way across the dirt road, the Witch announced, “In two miles, turn right on Route 41.”
“Finally!” Mom was hugging the driving wheel like a lifesaver while the dirt car-trail threw her around the cockpit like a stormy sea. She’d been in that position for so long that her body was half-stuck in the twisted posture of a crone. She sat up tall and a crackling sound came from between her shoulders.
“Are we almost there yet?” I asked.
“We’re still about 20 miles away, and I want to make sure this damned dirt road actually ends before we stop for the night. All we need is a little faith that if we keep going, it’ll all turn out okay. It said the road was a numbered highway, so it must be paved.”
“In a quarter mile, turn right,” the Witch congratulated.
The wheels went quiet as the Wagon turned.
“See?” Mom said in the voice of someone who just won a game of tug and realized the fun was over. “And the trailhead's only about 20 miles from here. We’ll be there in no time.”
“Turn left,” the Witch butted in.
Mom cocked her head, sensing mischief. “What? Where?” .
“You see that dirt road through the bog up there?” the Witch said. "Turn there.”
Despite Mom's whining, the Wagon turned anyway.
“Continue on this road for nineteen miles,” the Witch commanded with the satisfaction of someone who’s won an argument.
Nearly the whole road was shade by now, the sky was turning soft, and my tummy was grumbling. “Now you’ve done it” I said. “You said we could never be lost as long as we knew where to sleep, but we’ll never find a place to make camp on all these empty forest roads in the middle of nowhere.”
The Wagon swerved into the wide spot on the outside of a curve overlooking the valley we’d just left.
“Forget it! What’s the point of looking for an out-of-the-way place to sleep when we’ve been driving on dirt roads all day without seeing a soul? We’re spending the night here,” Mom narrated. “Come on, you needa go potty?”
As the swamps in the valley turned to melted gold under the sun’s low light, I sniffed around the grass at the edge of the road for a potty. “Are meese the scariest thing you could meet in a dark forest in Idaho?” I asked.
“Meese?”
“Yeah. The word for lots of mooses.” Mom’s supposed to be the one who knows how words work, but sometimes I have to remind her. “If a flock of gooses are called geese, a flock of mooses must be called meese.”
“They’re just called moose, no matter how many there are,” Mom said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I guess who you don’t want to meet on a dark forest depends on who you are. Idaho has the highest concentration of white supremacists per capita of any state.”
I knew each state had a capitol, so I could probably figure out what per capitol meant if she kept talking. “What’s a white supreme racist?” I asked to get her going.
“People with a preference for pale skin and a selective sense of history,” she said to hide what she really meant behind a pile of words. “It’d be better if no one in the world knew what a white supremacist was. It’s one of those curses that feeds on words and gets worse the more you talk about them.”
“Like Beetlejuice?” I asked.
“Sort of. Except they appear when you spout their ideas, not their name. The rest of the time they’re kind of invisible. That’s the scariest part. You don’t usually know you’re talking to one until they share their views on spicy food or the holiday cups at Starbucks.”
I was about to ask Mom how you could know something was bad without someone telling you about it when a noise ripped through the wilder-ness, making us both turn. It wasn’t the kind of roar a river made, but more like a gigantic wasp gearing up for a fight.
Following the sound, a group of big men on tiny go-carts buzzed out of the forest, beards fluttering in the breeze. It took me a moment to recognize them, since the whining Power Wheels they rode had four wheels instead of two.
I’d never met another celebrity before. “Mom! Look who it is!” I wagged.
“Oh brother,” Mom said, looking at the Wagon like it might offer somewhere to hide.
“Not brothers, sons!” I squealed. “It’s the Sons of Anarchy, from TV!”
As the Sons of Anarchy zoomed closer, Mom’s nervousness crackled in the air. If you didn’t know her, you might think her frozen smile and stiff shoulders were natural. Oh look! Someone left a mannequin in the middle of the forest, an Idahomebody might think. It’s probably what the Sons of Anarchy thought, because they looked relaxed and confident on their commuting lawn mowers as their helmetless head-fur streamed freely behind them.
“Don’t let their leather jackets, lustrous hair, and big muscles intimidate you,” I whispered. “People are scared of me for the same reason. But don’t worry, they’re not gonna pump your gas unless you ask them to.”
“I’m not scared they’re gonna...” her phony smile stayed frozen in place while she searched for the word, “...pump my gas,” she said finally, like it meant something else. “Country folk can be territorial. Especially toward people from California.”
“It’s okay. I’ll do the talking.” I took a step forward to show that I was the Suckergewea of this expedition. “They’ll be so excited to meet a real, live potato beast, and so impressed that you’re with me, that they won’t even ask if you’re from around here.”
Mom looked down at her legs, where cats jumped out of fluffy clouds all up and down her tights. She'd been so excited to find them in the little kids’ section at Walmart, but now her face looked like someone caught wearing no pants at all. Her eyes cut back to the mailman tattoos on the flank of the Covered Wagon and landed on my stylish lobster bandana. “They’ll know,” she said.
“How?”
Mom hid the seaweed snacks she’d been chomping on behind her back and clamped her smile even tighter. “The license plates, for a start,” she said through kelp-speckled teeth.
It was impossible to read the Sons’ eyes behind those dark sunglasses. Their faces were as still as Mom’s, but without the smile. As they got closer, each one pointed their sunglasses at the Wagon long enough to give it a good, hard look.
I took another half-step forward and gave them a grin as big as Mom’s (but better, because my smile matched my eyes). “Hi guys. I’m Oscar!” I wagged. “Yes, it’s true. Real, live potato-beast, at your service... Hey! Where are you going?”
One by one, they buzzed close enough to spit on us, each one looking Mom up and down as they passed. Or, I think they were looking her up and down, because their heads bobbed from down by her toes to the beak of her baseball cap and back before turning their sunglasses to the road and nyrroomming away. They were probably intimidated by my celebrity.
I watched them disappear down the dirt road in a cloud of dust until a loud cracking sound behind me snapped me out of it.
To be continued next week...