The Lewiston Highway is a hot one now, and there is a good chance that you’ll breathe smoke driving it, but just months ago it was something else. I found this piece I started in spring and didn’t get around to finishing and sending out. I hope it cools you down.
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I love the drive between Enterprise, Oregon, and Clarkston-Lewiston Washington-Idaho. Yes, there are some curves, and some deep ups and downs, the road is narrow at times, and in deep fog, rain, or snow visibility can be a problem. But a friend once said we would have more traffic on Highway 3 if we sold tickets—tickets to the adventure and beauty of it.
On Friday, May 31, I drove it at its best. It was a spring day with so many shades of green in fields, forests, and canyon walls, yellow and purple flowers, white syringa and elderberry blossoms, and gold morning light streaming through trees as if it was driven.
Traffic? I passed one logging truck between Enterprise and Clarkston, and no one passed me. I counted up to a dozen rigs coming towards me: four empty log trucks; a few pickups and cars, and one motorcycle.
A few miles out of Enterprise Stangel’s bison herd lazed and grazed on the west side of the highway. One loan buffalo stranded on the other side was happy with the pickings. It reminded me that my friend Ralph says that there were native buffalo–bison– here, that the last Oregon buffalo was shot in the 1870s. Ralph and wildlife biologist Vic Coggins claim finds of bison bones, maybe even a “buffalo jump”—the cliff or high spot the Nez Perce would have driven the animals over before they had horses and rifles to make the hunt easier.
Just as I woke from my buffalo reverie, the hills on both sides of the highway were dotted with sheep, domestic sheep and two shepherds watching lazily as the sheep grazed on this fine spring day. I once knew how many sheep were in a “band”—maybe a thousand ewes plus lambs?
There were more sheep here when I arrived in 1971, and as one of my jobs was to find jobs for people, I remember sending herders to Greg and Gayle Johnson on Temperance Creek on the Snake River. And I remember that Gayle would sometimes find a herder “on leave,” who had not made it back to work in the boarding room above Homan’s Drug Store. Once I sent a young man just out of the Peace Corps, who knew nothing of sheep, to Greg, who flew him from the Enterprise airport to the Snake River. Dan stuck it out for a year or two. He didn’t come to town for months, and we had a pizza party for him at Vali’s when he did.
Years later we all got a better picture of the herding life and a big sheep operation in Pam Royes’ memoir, Temperance Creek., when she and Skip roamed that country horseback, packed and herded sheep, learned sourdough and the country
Past the sheep, I climbed up Snowhollow Hill, listened to the radio or not, thought about what I’d seen and might see, about previous trips over this road to baseball games in Lewiston, to see a brother in Pullman, to go to the Nez Perce National Historical Park. I’d seen bear, elk and eagles, ice floating in big chunks on the Grande Ronde, had eaten famous pies at Bogan’s Oasis, and looked across, from the Washington side, to a place high on the Oregon side where Jack Hemingway, the writer’s son, once lived. A gaggle of us, parents and kids, once rode our bikes from the Washington State line down down and across the bridge, where we turned onto the Grande Ronde River Road and pedaled most of the way to Troy and a waiting pickup to take us and our bikes back up the hill.
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I didn’t get this finished and sent out in May, and it would be a mighty different drive today. And we probably couldn’t sell tickets!
But spring will come again.
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Bison photo from Stangel web page
