I've been walkin' on the Railroad

This story and photos of a hike across the U.S. was submitted by Washington State University instructor William Engels. It will be presented in four parts.

MILWAUKEE ROAD — Every other summer for the past five years, I've been engaged in a project that is gradually taking shape, far beyond my original conceptions, as a walk from west to east across the U.S.

So far, it has also been a celebration of an American heritage, the golden age of long-distance railroad travel and transport. I am following the route of the former Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railway, later known as the Milwaukee Road.

Improving on a brochure on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail handed to me at the trip planner counter at the REI store in Seattle, I walked from Lind to North Bend on the Milwaukee Road corridor in August of 2011.

An account of that hike was published in the Othello Outlook in April of 2013. Now we cover the July, 2013 hike east from Lind to Plummer, Idaho and the August 2015 walk from Plummer to St. Regis, Mont.

“There's not much out there,” the groundskeeper at the war memorial park in Ralston told me when I broke camp on the morning of the second day out of Lind. But then he told me to watch out for rattlesnakes.

The contradiction, applied to nature, of a simultaneous absence and presence would characterize that summer's hike.

First, the dry landscape, known as channeled scablands, that I crossed in the first three days of the hike were themselves desolate in appearance yet abundant in wildlife. I had been escorted into Ralston the day before by a young coyote who ran down the trail ahead of me, then stopped to look back and, seeing me still coming, ran on again.

He must have repeated this performance half a dozen times. Near my campsite on the morning of day three, I saw four antlered bucks together.

There were many deer, and I sometimes used their dirt beds, scooped out of the shady side of a rock wall bordering the corridor, to rest and escape from the heat.

One of my favorite moments was sitting above a beautiful deep-blue pond watching two mother ducks feeding their one or two cheeping red-headed ducklings trailing behind them in the reeds. This was near Rock Creek in the Revere Wildlife Area.

The abandoned state of Ewan inspired my revision “Erehwon”—“Nowhere” spelled backwards, after the title of Samuel Butler's satirical utopian novel. This community was in the vicinity of Rock Lake, an area teeming with wildlife.

I was startled by what were apparently two ring-necked pheasants, huge birds that I mistook for four-legged animals when they came waddling out of the clump of tall reeds I was passing. A pair of bald eagles in flight above the pines on my side of the lake and an owl were among the other birds I spotted at Rock Lake.

As I approached a boat landing on a dirt road that descended from the corridor, I wakened and sent running a young coyote sleeping in the shade not 30 feet away. The ample wildlife — as well as stunning scenery — make Rock Lake one of Washington state's best-kept secrets.

A second absence-presence opposition of the hike can be captured by another near-rhyme: hostility-hospitality. The environment, especially in the dry, shadeless scablands, where the temperature must have been over 100 those three July days, was ill-disposed toward solitary intruders on foot and even, at times, downright malevolent.

At my camp halfway between Marengo and Revere on the third night, I had to make do with a cold supper for lack of water and put a stop to a neighborhood assembly of yelping coyotes by beaming my flashlight at them.

And what was that sound like faint footsteps and a chain swung lightly against a metal gate that I heard when I removed my earplugs once during the night?