Reamde

And yet none of this careful hope deadening and expectation crushing on her trainers’ parts had fully prepared her for the job of traveling from Wenatchee to Bourne’s Ford on public transportation. She’d been lucky to reach the bus station in Wenatchee just a few minutes before the coach to Spokane was scheduled to depart. It was running half an hour late. No big deal. She bought a ticket with cash and climbed aboard a tired intercity bus reeking of mildew and air freshener and sat on it for several hours, watching the high desert of central and eastern Washington State go by, trying not to make too much of an impression on the down-at-heels senior citizens and migrant laborers sitting around her. A few hours later she disembarked at the bus and train station in downtown Spokane: a city she was certain had fine characteristics but that looked bleak and anonymous from street level at nightfall. It was ten degrees colder here than it had been on the coast. The next bus for Bourne’s Ford didn’t leave until tomorrow morning. She couldn’t check into a hotel without presenting ID and thereby sending up a flare, so she walked to a reasonably nice Italian restaurant and had a long slow dinner that she paid for with cash. Then she walked to a cinema and caught the last showing of a comedy that, she guessed, was aimed at teenagers. This disgorged her into a parking lot at one in the morning. Everything was closed. Not even bars were open. Caught in the open, she just kept walking, trying to look purposeful. If she had to walk for five hours, it wasn’t the end of the world. She was wearing comfortable flats and the energy expended by walking would keep her warm enough, despite the fact that she was underdressed for the weather. But after about two hours, as she was trudging up a seemingly endless commercial strip, she noticed a Perkins Family Restaurant that was open twenty-fours. She went into it and ate the most colossal breakfast she had ever had in her life, spent about an hour reading a single used copy of USA Today, then paid for the meal, went out, and hit the streets again.

By six in the morning the sky was getting light, joggers were out, and Starbucks cafés were beginning to open their doors. She killed another hour in one of those and then hiked back to the bus station, where she caught an 8:06 bus headed for Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. This was much like the first one, except with a certain hard-to-pin-down air of Wild West mountain-man craziness about it. The Wenatchee-Spokane run had been a simple matter of getting across a sparse desert, irrigated in some places, therefore with a generally farmlike vibe. She had noticed, as they’d drawn closer to Spokane, that trees were beginning to survive, just isolated specimens at first, then clumps, then small forests. But northward from Spokane the forest cover became continuous, the highway began to bound up and down considerable slopes, and the businesses and dwellings along it stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course she just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America, interspersed with clusters of vacation homes (wherever there was a lake or a nice stretch of river), ranches (where the land was open and flat), or outbreaks of Appalachian-style rural poverty. Sometimes they’d jump over a ridge and pass through what she thought was out-and-out wilderness, until she saw the zigzagging tracks of the logging roads.

Then suddenly they were passing through a rather nice town, which she learned was Sandpoint, and which had all the indicia—brewpub, art gallery, Pilates, Thai restaurant—of a place where Blue State people would go to enjoy a high standard of living while maintaining nonstop connectivity and assuaging their guilty consciences in re global warming, fair trade, and the regrettable side effects of Manifest Destiny. The bus stopped there for a bit; many passengers got off, and only a few got on. For, as was obvious from looking out the windows, northern Idaho was not a place where anyone could sustainably live unless they had access to a vehicle of some description, so the market for public transit was correspondingly tiny and mostly limited to juveniles, very old people, shaggy men who appeared to be one step above vagrants, and women in ankle-length Little House on the Prairie–style dresses—apparently members of some very traditional religious sect.

An hour later she was in the considerably smaller and less Blue Statish town of Bourne’s Ford, and half an hour after that—for it turned out to be a bit of a walk—she was in its Walmart.