October 15 is a big deadline in the tax business. In some ways it's worse than April 15. Even though there aren't nearly as many returns left to do, the ones that do linger till the bitter end are usually the ugliest ones. After Oct 15, not much happens for the rest of the year, particularly in a non-workaholic office like the one where I work. My boss declared the office closed for the weekend and encouraged us all to take long weekends, so I took the opportunity for a road trip. Since I'd be going alone, I picked a destination that I know has no appeal for my wife: Idaho and Montana.

I don't believe in rushing while on vacation — to me that seems to defeat the purpose of vacation — so I took my time getting ready Friday morning and didn't get on the road until about 1:00 pm. I assumed that still gave me plenty of time to cross Eastern Washington on the slower northern road (Hwy 2, for those of you following on the map) and still take the short detour to pass by Grand Coulee Dam, which I've never seen.

My estimate of how long it would take was not far off, but I misjudged the effects of being three weeks past the equinox and 200 miles east of where I'd begun. When I reached Coulee City at 6:20 it was already twilight and I doubted the sun would last long enough for me to make the remaining 30 miles to the dam. But it's not far out of the way, and I was in no hurry, so I headed out that way anyway.

Sure enough, I made it to the dam at 6:50 and the sun was completely gone, so now I still haven't see Grand Coulee Dam in the light. It does have some lights on it, so it wasn't completely invisible. I stopped in the parking lot at the visitor's center (closed at 5:00) and looked around a bit. There was another guy in the lot in a pickup truck. He came out and said hello to me. Turns out he's the janitor who cleans the visitor's center. He acted like a tour guide, telling me about the dam and pointing out some things about what little we could see across the reservoir (further away than it looked in the dark). Really nice guy, I hope they pay him well.

After that I figured I'd spend the night in Spokane, since east of Spokane is where the scenery gets interesting again. But then after quite a bit of wandering around the Spokane area, both downtown (busy and crowded on a Friday night) and some neighboring suburbs, I found I wasn't ready to stop. I kept thinking I'd go a little further, a little further ... until I ended up spending the night at an inexpensive motel in Kellogg, Idaho. Idaho is narrow up at the top where I-90 crosses it, and at Kellogg I had already missed more than half of it in the dark, but I didn't really mind since my real goal for this trip was Montana.

When I take a road trip, I don't like to have an exact travel plan or schedule, but I do generally have a vague idea of where I'd like to reach. For this trip my primary goal was the Bitterroot Valley in Ravalli County, and my secondary goal was Glacier National Park, both in Montana. The Bitterroot Valley first entered my consciousness when I read Jared Diamond's Collapse, in which he describes the Valley in rhapsodic terms. I don't remember any exact phrases, but it was something like "some of the most breathtakingly spectacular scenery on the entire continent".

Mr Diamond's aesthetics must not match mine. I thought the Valley was pretty, but nothing special. It's wide and flat with lots of farms and livestock in the middle and mountains off somewhere in the distance. To me it looks like a slightly greener and slightly more populated version of the Shasta Valley near Yreka in the northernmost part of California. I can think of dozens of more beautiful areas in the western United States and Canada, including the part of Idaho I where I woke up.

I didn't go all the way up the Bitterroot Valley, just far enough to get the sense of what it was really like. A few miles north of Hamilton I took a side road that promised to lead to a trailhead. It wandered up into the forested foothills, which was sort of nice, but again it reminded me of California. It felt a lot like the roads leading into the hills around the outer Bay Area. So I bailed on the hike and decided to turn around and get back north to Glacier National Park while it was still light.

Once again, it got dark sooner than I expected. As I moved in on Glacier, by way of a prettier side road through the forest (Hwy 83), the sun was going down and it gradually became clear I wasn't going to make it. I briefly lamented that I didn't go to Glacier first, but then I knew that if I hadn't seen the Bitterroot Valley I'd still be wondering about it. (And even though it didn't meet my expectations after what I read in Collapse, I'm still glad to have experienced it.) Not long after that — all of this is going through my mind as twilight settled on Hwy 83 — it occurred to me that it would be silly to get so close to Glacier and then turn around go home. So Saturday night I checked into a Motel 6 in Kalispell, with the intent of seeing Glacier in the morning.

Glacier National Park is home to the "Road to the Sun", which Brux had once listed in an email to me as among his favorite roads (a better recommendation than Jared Diamond). I can see why. In my view it doesn't rival the Top of the World (Alaska, between Route 5 and the Yukon border) nor the Icefields Parkway (between Jasper and Banff, and more romantic-sounding in French: "Promenade des Glaciers"), but it could be a strong candidate for the number 3 spot. At the park entrance I was informed that the road was closed at the pass at the top, but the side I was on is the more spectacular side anyway, so it was still worth the $25 just to drive up and back.

The road starts along the side of a lovely lake in the forest. Mountains looms all around, and after a few miles on one of the mountains up ahead in the distance you catch glimpses of a line running straight across it about halfway up. "Is that the road?" you think. Yes, it is. You drive right up the mountainside, past numerous waterfalls, and numerous pullouts where you can stop and gaze down into the huge valley below. It's the only place I've been in the contiguous United States where everything is Alaska sized.

Alas, I was not in the best state of mind to fully appreciate it. Some of that has nothing to do with the road, but some of it is directly related. For me, a big part of the charm of the Icefields Parkway and the Top of the World is that it's easy to feel like you're all alone out in the middle of nowhere. In Glacier, even in October, I was part of a caravan of vehicles traveling together. I can only imagine how crowded it would be in the summer.

Near the top we ascended into icy fog so that I could see barely anything in the vicinity of the (closed) visitor's center where we had to turn around and go back. Even if the road weren't closed, I don't imagine the pass itself would have been much fun, though it might have been nice to see the other side of the divide, which I am told is like a completely different park. Earlier in the day I had entertained the idea of driving around the park (via Hwy 2) to the other side, but dismissed it as completely impractical. I now intended to get back to Idaho before sundown in order to see what I had missed the day before.

That didn't work out either: It was dark before I got to the state border, so I've still seen very little of Idaho. What I did see of Idaho I loved. I like mountains best when you feel like you're right in the middle of them. In Montana, except for Glacier and a few spots near the Idaho border, it always felt like the mountains were somewhere off in the distance. All of the settled areas of Montana I visited (which admittedly is just one small corner of the state) were like the Bitterroot Valley: sited in big flat open areas with the mountains off in the distance. You could always see the mountains, but you were never actually in them.

On my AAA map, the dots signifying "scenic drive" along I-90 begin at the state line and continue into Montana. My experience was just the opposite. After crossing into Montana the scenery gradually changes from gorgeous to pleasant to bland. Approaching Missoula it looked just like the Bay Area, more gold than green with lots of rolling hills. The bit of Missoula I skirted on the way to Ravalli County could easily have been in the outer Bay Area (like, say, Pleasanton) — though later when I went through a neighborhood in the old part of Missoula it didn't feel like California at all. It reminded me a bit of old Everett (which I surmise is about half due to similar architectural history and half to coincidence).

Another odd thing I found in Montana was that all the distances were so much bigger than I expected. I grew up in Alaska, so I'm no stranger to distances. Still, somehow every time I went anywhere in Montana it took longer than I expected, in contrast to Idaho which always seemed to zoom by. The speed limit was a generous 75 mph in both states, and I wasn't driving any slower in Montana, so it must have been something psychological. Maybe something about the landscape, or maybe an illusion having to do with how the lines and shapes appear on the map. Next time I go east I'll skip Montana and just wander around northern Idaho.

Among the marvels I witnessed for the first time in the state of Idaho: when I left the motel Saturday morning, I noticed that the people cleaning the rooms were white teenagers. (Two boys and one girl, and the girl was clothed in a way that made it look like she might be pregnant.) It sounds like a joke, but I honestly don't think I've ever seen a hotel room anywhere cleaned by a white person. That's Idaho. I guess the dark-skinned folks don't get that far, which is a shame for those of us who love both mountains and racial diversity.

Northern Idaho has something of a reputation for being the land of racist skinheads. I never really believed that's a fair characterization, and I still don't. Everyone I met in Idaho seemed perfectly nice, and with the exception of two mean-looking old women I saw at a rest stop, none looked like they'd be overtly racist. On the other hand, I must admit there were many places where I could easily imagine the good-natured Idahoans saying to one another as they pointed across the room, "Look at that nice African-American lady over there." "She looks like the ones I've seen on TV." "I wonder if she sings." And I have come to understand that that can be just as annoying.

I did not see a single non-white person in Idaho, though admittedly I probably saw fewer than a hundred people there. In Montana I saw no Hispanics, one Asian woman (in Glacier, probably Asian-American but clearly a visitor there), four young adults who seemed to be all or part Native American (three boys and one girl, on separate occasions; presumably local), and one black woman. The latter was in the Motel 6 office in Kalispell when I was checking out. Her white companion was trying to soothe her as she had what appeared to be a panic attack. I didn't stick around long enough to get the story, but I suppose the cause of her distress was probably something other than being in a state full of white people. Even so, it didn't improve my impression of the place.

Although I saw no actual Hispanic people, I did see, a few miles past Coeur d'Alene, a sign for the Cataldo Mission. Not far off the highway, with its Spanish-looking facade brightly lit up, was an old building completely in the style of the many missions I'd seen in California. What were the Spanish doing way the heck up here in Northern Idaho? Did they really range that far?

No, they didn't. The Coeur d'Alene Indians heard rumor of Catholic missionaries and sent out word asking for some to come visit them. In the 1840s, not long before the West began to fill up with Americans, the Church sent a mission out their way. One of the missionaries, an Italian Jesuit named Antonio Ravalli, designed the church building and supervised its building. Later he went on to Montana where they named the county after him (as well as a nearby town which isn't in the county).

Not long before my trip I went out and bought my first digital camera, something I've been thinking of doing for years but never got around to till now. I've never been much for photography: I dislike the practice of photographing people, and I dislike even more using a camera to capture experience in order that it can be relived at another time or by another person. My feeling is that one cannot live in more than one moment at a time, so any time spent reliving past moments on film can only come at the expense of the present. Cameras thus serve to discourage people from appreciation of the here and now.

As St Exupéry's Little Prince learns from his flower, the essence of spiritual beauty is its ephemerality. When a picture robs something of that ephemerality it thereby diminishes its beauty in the eyes of its beholders. (This, by the way, is similar to how photographing a person diminishes the person. It does not "steal the person's soul" per se. Rather, it steals a piece of the actual person. The idea of a soul is a cultural myth which helps us to deny that reality, just as it allows us to deny the reality that life ends with death. That is why so many non-Western cultures once objected to photography but became inured to it as they were absorbed into Western culture.)

And yet in spite of that, I still had an interest in the camera as a tool for creating images of art. In my case I had an idea to look for striking imagery in unusual perspectives of mundane things, but the same idea could work for something else. I can even see the value in pictures of human beings, so long as they are acting strictly as models and there is no attempt to capture their personality. I suppose that means I'm saying photographing models is OK only if it does objectify them, which ironically is the opposite of what so many moralists preach. This is related to why I don't object to having my picture taken when I'm performing on stage, but I dislike it at any other time.

But I digress. Having bought the camera and tried it out just enough to know how to work it (I didn't find the zoom button till the second day), I was thinking of none of these things while on my trip. Armed with my new toy, I took a few pictures of scenery whenever I thought, "ooh, my wife would like this." (This in spite of knowing that she doesn't like pictures any more than I do, though for somewhat different reasons, and would probably have no interest whatsoever in viewing pictures of my trip.) I took a couple more of the darkened Grand Coulee Dam, and of Idaho in the morning, but it wasn't until Sunday in Glacier National Park that I really got going.

There's oodles of scenery at Glacier, and like any good amateur photographer, I was popping out of the car to take pictures of anything that looked pretty. On the road up the mountain there were two segments under construction where traffic was stopped for several minutes. We all got out of our cars and I joined the hordes snapping pictures at the valley below.

Approaching the summit, in the icy fog, I realized something: I really hadn't appreciated the scenery nearly as much as I usually do on similar drives. The difference was the camera. Normally, when I stop I like to get out and look around and appreciate just being there. This time, all I was thinking about was getting a good picture, and then once the picture was taken I'd think "mission accomplished" and pop back in my car. It was an icky feeling. All my philosophizing here about the perils of photography are thoughts I've had for many many years, and yet when I was there in the park with a camera I forgot all my philosophy and started taking pictures anyway.

Cameras are like Sauron's rings of power. They are extremely useful, and the temptation to use them for good is enormous. But even the smallest use has its price. It takes great force of will to resist the temptation, and even the strongest person will eventually be reduced to a ghost after extensive use.

I'm not yet ready to throw my camera into the fires of Mount Doom, but like Frodo after the incident at the Prancing Pony, I am chastened by my foolhardiness and will exercise more restraint in the future. On the trip back down the mountain, at the first traffic stop, I pulled the camera out of my bag and deleted about half the pictures (the more frivolous ones) right there. Then after I got home I deleted the rest.

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