Jackson Pass

Jackson Pass

We fought, Bob, Susan, and I

over who got the window.

No one wanted it.

Through tempered glass we saw gravel,

the tops of lodgepole pines,

and the road again.

Straight up. Straight down.

I slid into my seat,

burrowed into any book.

I wouldn't count the switchbacks,

hairpin turns Daddy called them.

He sat relaxed, hands easy on the wheel

even when one of us would scream.

Not even the safety of the seatbelts held us

on the slippery blue of that plastic backseat

in the old Chevy.

Daddy laughed and told stories

his father used to tell,

almost true stories of the Old West.

Grandad was a trucker,

hauled freight in a wagon

snaking up and over Jackson Pass

on the unimproved road.

Jackson Hole, Freedom, Tetonia, West Yellowstone,

St. Anthony, Sugar City, and Wilford

where later tiny Vera was buried

almost before she was born.

Summer complaint, Grandma called it.

Grandad's hands were as good as his horses:

he could drive anything with that team.

He had charge of the Yellowstone stage

the day the horses got spooked by gunshot

in front of the lodge by the Falls.

Straight for the canyon rim they went

at a dead run

before the guests had time to step out

onto the stool ready at the door.

Grandad soothed them, turned the team

with inches to spare.

Franklin Roosevelt was on that stage,

so the story goes.

Grandad stopped driving and took to farming

sometime after he courted Stella,

soothed her into marrying him.

The longest way home is the sweetest way home

he told me fom his leather chair

by the uncurtained window

that faced the dusty Umatilla street.

A good team always knows the way home

Grandad said with the sun on his face

long after Grandma died.

His hands lay flat on his thighs.

Some time after they put Vera in the ground

he just couldn't stay put in one place anymore,

so he quit farming.

A road engineer they called him later in the newspaper,

but he earned it the hard way,

digging ditches while Grandma cooked for the crew.

Grandad built roads and bridges in Idaho

and all over eastern Oregon,

improved roads for other to people to drive on.

He died in Umatilla with garters on his sleeves,

far from Jackson Pass.

His good hands lay still in the box.

I didn't go to his funeral.

It was on a school day.

March 17, 1996

revised August 5, 2006

copyright Rinda Fullmer