The drive last night was one of the most surreal night long drives of my life. We got on highway 13 which zigzags around the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. Sarah crawled in the back and fell asleep right outside some little hick town and right afterward the CD Player quit so it was me and the rumbly AM stations I could half pick up. Highway 13 is the windiest most disorienting road I’ve ever driven. The official speed limit was something like 60 MPH, but there wasn’t a stretch in the 50 miles of the road that didn’t have a 25-35 MPH limit attached to it on account of the constant curves. It was a nauseating stretch of road.

All through the Couer d’Alene reservation people were camping, having bonfires, fishing, you name it. It was the only section of road we drove this trip where all along it people were out in the world living. In the black stretches (there was no moon what-so-ever) between bonfires and the little crowded towns I felt like I was driving circles up around mountains, but then suddenly I’d break out onto some impossible river where there should just have been air, rivers that seemed too wide to have broken out of the emptiness of the night.

I’d follow the river along, climbing a mountain, tendrils of trees reaching over the road, white like they’d been encrusted in snow but there was no other snow anywhere. Then without any warning, another town, crowded and stretching along the highway for a few minutes with people poring from RVs and crowded around fires, people smoking beside faded teepees. After over an hour the road straightened out and for a few miles just before highway 12 I drove all of 60 mph. Another podunk town and we were on highway 12.

The road soon had six foot tall banks of snow to either side, and little flittery mice skittered from one side of the road to the other. There were no other cars to speak of until I came on a semi that had been going the other way until it buried itself halfway into the bank.

There was a state trooper stopped right behind the truck and a SUV stopped, talking with the cop. After a few minutes the other car drove on and the trooper yelled across to me to go ahead and drive on, but the other car would be turning around. So I did, I drove and drove, the headlights carving a tunnel out of the darkness, going slow and trying to dodge the mice.

At one point a small herd of five elk were standing in the middle of the highway. They spooked as soon as the lights hit them but the banks were so high with snow they just ran thirty feet ahead of the car for what seemed like a minute but was probably only seconds.

The rest of the drive was just the usual schlep. We rolled in to Missoula at about 2 AM. I was tired as hell and couldn’t settle on a good place to park to sleep, but after a bit we just sat the van in front of the apartment building we’d lived in a few years ago and, covering up the windows, went the fuck to sleep. No dreams could have been as unreal as the last several hours had been so I took the night off from dreaming and just slept, deep and solid, until the traffic brought me back late in the morning.