Halett And Wisconsin

MC 2000

The Diary: Adam Haslett

This week I’m driving with a friend from Seattle to New York City in that great rite of American travel, the cross-country trip. I’ve driven cross-country a few times before but never along this sparsely populated northern route. Past the fog-bound Cascade Mountains east of Seattle, where the heaviest snows in decades have yet to melt in mid-June, we enter a gorgeous landscape of crystalline lakes and high meadows before descending on to the semi-arid plateau that makes up most of Washington state.

A five-hour drive brings us to the Idaho border, into the northern Rocky Mountains, and the beginnings of real libertarian country. Northern Idaho is the site of Ruby Ridge, the FBI’s infamously botched 1992 raid on the home of the heavily armed survivalist Randy Weaver and his family. They and the other militia types that have flocked here in their wake have given the area a reputation for intense hostility to the federal government.

Idaho’s thin up here, a cleaver handle just an hour wide, and we’re soon into western Montana, known for the same live-and-let live attitude. In our attempt to avoid staying in any chain hotels, we’ve booked into an unlikely bed and breakfast in the tiny town of St Regis. Our hosts, it turns out, are a gay couple.

My first thought is that they saw Brokeback Mountain . Jeff Taylor, proprietor, and his partner John, online retailer of vintage western boots and apparel, are very much natives. They watch Fox News, dress in camouflage outerwear, drive ATVs (all-terrain vehicles, for you city slickers), deride the Environmental Protection Agency and, when asked how they’re received in the community, answer, “We don’t leave the property much."At breakfast, the lead story in the local paper is about a manhunt for a guy who shot a local police officer trying to start a war with NATO.

In 15 years or so there will be no more glaciers in Glacier National Park, which is one reason we decided to come this way.