Days 72-74 – 9/13-9/15 – Montpelier to Pocatello, ID – 94 miles

The terrain through southern Idaho makes me think of a hand, its fingers outstretched northward, each digit a hilly ridge, the gap in between the byproduct of a small river’s patient work. Wheat and hay, recently cropped and shining brightly in the late-summer sun, fill the valley floor, interspersed with nervous cows and rambunctious horses, the former bolting at first sight of me and the latter sprinting over with curiosity. The sandstone and limestone ridges flanking my walking path–along with the adjacent US 30 and what was once Idaho’s first railroad line, all bundled together in this cramped valley–roll languorously first to the north and then take a hard right through Soda Springs. In time, they are supplanted by the sharper, darker lava rock, foreshadowing my arrival in Lava Hot Springs, where the valley narrows to a gorge, barely leaving room for all the tourists to cram in on a lovely Saturday afternoon. While the valley would, in time, widen once more, a testament to the Portneuf River’s persistence, and the lava rock would yield the floor, the same formula carried me through to Pocatello: a golden valley escorted onward by rolling hills.

Just west of here, across a couple of those finger ridges, sits Buck’s Peak, where Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is set. Raised deep in the country by a fundamentalist Mormon family, Westover’s account centers on the power of education as a transformative tool, saving her from an abusive, unstable, dead-end life with a hyper-controlling father and a vacillating and unreliable mother, not to mention a terrifying brother. Somehow, this girl who was home-schooled, to the degree that she was kept at home and had a few substandard textbooks available to her when she wasn’t supporting the family scrap business, nailed her ACT, completed her undergraduate work at BYU, and then impressed every professor she encountered as she moved through Cambridge and Harvard en route to a PhD. It’s a remarkable story of personal triumph, but ultimately it’s most revealing as a snapshot of life in deep, rural America.

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Every morning, I set out in darkness. There’s just not enough light left to go around. For reasons I can’t fully articulate, beginning a long walk before dawn feels like a sign of strength and determination. I’m choosing to set that alarm, to push beyond the protective glow of town streetlights and trust my feet as they navigate crumbling highway shoulders with disemautoed headlights careening towards me. By contrast, concluding a walk in darkness feels like failure, like I didn’t pull a sufficiently steady pace to get me in the door at a respectable hour. The longer the day, and the shorter the daylight, the earlier a departure required.

Departing Montpelier, I pause to appreciate the M emblazoned on the hilltop overlooking town. Plenty of towns do the big white letter; not nearly as many adorn it with lights, as Montpelier does. Two miles later, I’m struck by a second set of lights in the darkness, announcing a travel center, complete with gas station, mini-mart, and restaurant. It doesn’t matter that I just drank a half-gallon of coffee–I’m a moth to the caffeinated flame.

Leaving Soda Springs, the highway loops around the Alexander Reservoir, which glistens like a giant sapphire as the sun breaks its slumber, still hidden behind the surrounding hills but offering sufficient illumination to spark each somnolent ripple. Sheep Rock sits just beyond, another famous Oregon Trail landmark, where the Bear River begins its retreat from Idaho, turning south for Salt Lake City, and the Wasatch Mountains come to a halt. In the early dawn, the geological sentry stares dimly towards me, saving its brilliance for later in the afternoon.

The alarm rings even earlier in McCammon, ripping me from my bivy cocoon at 4am. It’s a slow process, striking camp and getting everything packed snugly in near-complete darkness, but the routine is well established at this point. The town is dead at this early hour; even the dogs, so quick to complain about my presence the night before, can’t be bothered to care.

Sometimes darkness makes the rare lights shine more brightly, focusing our attention on what really matters. Other times, it lends its own beauty to the surrounding scenery, making the early dawn vistas all the more momentous. On this morning, though, the other side of the coin prevailed–the fear and uncertainty that sometimes lurks around unseen corners. The minor road I’m following degrades from pavement to gravel and curves left, then right, with old cars lining the sides. A rock wall suddenly appears in front of me, bringing my progress to an immediate halt. My smartphone flashlight gradually helps me to make sense of what I’m seeing. The railroad cuts through here, ten feet above; the rocky impediment isn’t a wall so much as a mound. It’s steep enough to pose challenges given the weight I’m carrying, but I scramble to the top, where the challenge shifts. My feeble light reveals a vague descent into shrubbery, but nothing resembling a path. One problem at a time. The first step is to descend without face-planting. Ever so tentatively, I shuffle downward, catching myself twice when large rocks shift suddenly underfoot.

Sure enough, the rumor of a dirt road emerges once I reach the bottom. Not ten feet later, though, I hit another impediment–a wall of cement barriers blocking my forward progress. This one’s easier to surmount, as I roll over the top and find myself on a decommissioned bridge over what must be a small creek, if it were possible to see the water coursing below. Fortunately, the bridge can still take my weight, so I cross in a handful of steps, pull the same maneuver over another series of cement barriers, and find myself returned to the road that both my gps and Google Maps had assured me was here.

In daylight, this likely would have been a non-event. From the railroad, I could have easily evaluated the way forward, and operated free of doubt about where I was headed. In the dark, though, there were so many things that could have gone wrong, or at least whispered the possibility of going wrong.

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For a subsection of Americans, Idaho represents one of the last bastions of freedom. Idaho has long been praised by fiscal conservatives for its anti-regulatory approach, placing second in the country in the Cato Institute’s 2024 assessment, and it also earns high marks for “land-use and energy freedom,” though a recent federal ruling that shut down a proposed phosphate mine near Soda Springs probably won’t win a lot of fans in that crowd. (The ACLU, meanwhile, would respond that the state is failing on a fundamental level to protect key freedoms for all.) And, whether a matter of correlation or causation, Idaho’s economy is booming, leading the country in payroll growth and GDP growth in the first quarter of 2024.

In the realm of education, Idaho has practically no regulations on homeschooling, and it houses a strong movement for school vouchers, though a recent initiative narrowly failed to pass. Of course, it also–as of this 2023 article–has the “worst-funded schools in the nation.”

One of the challenges we face today is that these big ideas–freedom, equality, diversity, inclusion–are so utterly elastic that they can be stretched to complete meaninglessness. (In progressive education, this has led to a “grading for equity” movement that is built more upon wishcasting than rigorous research, and I anticipate that within another decade we’re going to be grappling with the harm done from this movement. Not that the intellectuals behind it will suffer any consequences.) So, sure, on one hand, Idaho does well on educational freedom, giving families great latitude in making choices about what’s best for their children. And extending that viewpoint, Idaho could be doing better with educational freedom by providing vouchers that would facilitate greater school choice.

On the flipside, though, how is freedom undercut when funding is insufficient, when essential bond measures fail, when children are thinking more about how freezing it is, or lack quality resources to hold their attention? Can we argue with a straight face that equality of opportunity exists when low-income schools are particularly hamstrung by funding gaps, leaving students in decrepit facilities?

When I was younger, I remember complaining to a teacher about course requirements. “I know what I care about and what I’m interested in,” I probably whined, “so why do I have to take some science class that will never have any relevance to my life?” The answer has stuck with me through the years: “Imagine that you’re sitting in a room. Most of it is dark. You can see one door leading out. But there are other doors; they’re just hidden in shadows, out of sight. If I invited you to leave, which door would you take? Almost certainly, you’d opt for the one visible exit. And in theory, you would make that choice with some measure of freedom. I’m not forcing you to go that way. But if you’re blind to the alternatives, how much freedom did you really have? When we force you to learn a broad set of subjects and topics, it’s about maximizing your freedom as you move forward, helping you to make informed choices about where to go in your life.”

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Gene Westover, Tara’s father, knew where he wanted his kids to go in their lives. He had absolute clarity. An anti-government, conspiratorial-minded, end-of-times planner, he exerted near-complete control over the family in their isolated homestead. Tara didn’t even have a birth certificate for the first nine years of her life. While some of her older siblings were given the option of formal schooling, that door was solidly closed to Tara. To the extent that home-schooling occurred, it was individually driven, though with minimal educational resources and fit around the margins of the extensive chores and responsibilities apportioned out to the children.

Even when Tara managed to overcome those faulty foundations to independently study her way to a passing ACT score and admission to BYU, her ignorance was repeatedly exposed. No moment was more jarring than when she asked her professor what “Holocaust” meant. Coming from a family where her father was a proponent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Tara suddenly learned about just how faulty and misleading her early education was. A similar series of epiphanies unfolded when she discovered the truth behind Ruby Ridge and Randy Weaver, events that had been similarly misrepresented by her father.

Gene Westover was also adamantly opposed to Western, medical science, instead relying on prayer and his wife’s “homeopathic” cures. To his credit, to the extent that credit can be offered here, he lived in line with his beliefs, never more so than when his body was charred to a crisp by a scrap-salvaging accident, and he refused hospitalization. The descriptions of his treatment are gruesome–the scraping away of layers of dead skin, the desperation enema, the contorting of his ravaged fingers. Remarkably, his survival provided proof of concept to his wife’s treatments, transforming her small-scale operation into a highly lucrative business.

Maybe that’s the wildest thing of all about this story. From Gene Westover’s perspective, there’s ample evidence that he is on the winning side. His devotion to prayer healing was confirmed through his recovery and his wife’s financial success. His commitment to homeschooling was validated by the fact that three of his children went on to earn PhDs. His approach to parenting must have worked, given how many of his grown children settled on or around the family land, staying close to the core.

When you spend your life in the spotlight, surrounded by darkness, two things can happen. First, you start to see yourself as a hero, holding back the chaos and uncertainty that surrounds you. Second, you imagine more and more monsters lurking in the beyond, whispering threats and plotting against you.

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Gradually, over these three days, my view of Idaho expanded. Early on, my view was limited. I had a few negative encounters with drivers, including a pair of intentional honks as vehicles went whipping past, and one car that seemed to intentionally swerve towards me before pulling back–just to freak me out. These behaviors are almost unprecedented in my walk, as drivers have been cautious to a fault, all across the country. What was happening in Idaho?

Elsewhere, I found warning signs on public bathrooms calling upon people to treat them well, lest they be locked, noting abysmal treatment that wouldn’t be tolerated any further. In McCammon, I was warned that park bathrooms would only be unlocked with a waiver and a fee, due to problems with vandalism. For all its beauty, I started wondering if something was rotten in Idaho.

Such are the hazards of having only a narrow vantage point–of learning just enough to do some damage with faulty impressions based on a small sample size. Set aside those few cars and the larger positive pattern persisted throughout these stages. My host in Soda Springs was helpful; Lava Hot Springs was filled with happy families enjoying a Saturday on the water; the folks in McCammon went out of their way to change the sprinkler schedule so that I wouldn’t catch an unintentional shower when sleeping in the park. I met a pair of hunters while grabbing coffee in Inkom; an hour later, they passed me on the road, circled back around, and offered me a ride.

Even in Westover’s book, where it’s easy to draw negative conclusions about the kinds of people encircling her world, there’s her brother Tyler’s supportive concern, her friend Charles’s efforts to intervene, the dance teacher’s decision to change the recital costume to accommodate her modesty needs. Even among the family members more complicit in the extremism, we can see the periodic efforts to strain against those limitations, a recognition that they could see the limits of the brightly-lit path laid out in front of them by Gene.

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There’s an idea, particularly prominent among liberals, I think, that education is liberating, enlightening, and transformative. It unshackles us from ignorance. And again, for many liberals, tradition and religion are bound up in that notion of ignorance. Education moves us forward, out of the darkness and into the light.

And without question, that is the arc of Tara’s story, as her pursuit of education carries her away from Buck’s Peak, first into neighboring BYU, and then out of the country to Cambridge. Her transformation is finally confirmed when she schedules a full set of vaccinations, signaling her break from her father’s beliefs.

The image is of a dark room gradually brightening, until the whole space is illuminated. Every wall, every piece of furniture, every bit of decoration emerging in full detail. Finally, the enlightened soul can see things as they truly are, to know them in their entirety.

That’s awfully presumptuous and arrogant, though. Instead, I’ve come to think of education as equipping ourselves with additional flashlights of various sizes and colors. We can never hope to see things in full, with absolute clarity. The problem, though, is that as we add more flashlights to the mix, we deceive ourselves into believing that we have accomplished exactly that.

“Do you know what drives me nuts about liberals?” I was eating dinner with Brian, an older man and a veteran, and we were finally getting somewhere. “It’s the hypocrisy. Take electric vehicles. They talk and talk about how much better they are than gas vehicles, but they completely ignore the environmental impact of the lithium batteries, or the impact of lithium mining on people in third world countries.” Brian acknowledged that fossil fuels are a dead-end and that we need to be exploring alternatives. He’s not opposed to electric vehicles; he’s offended by the dogma.

And I get it. I neared a breaking point during the peak of “follow the science,” the smarmy tagline that kept Oregon schools closed late in the pandemic, as though the science were a singular, immutable, uncontestable notion. As conservative opposition to all manner of COVID restrictions surged, liberals similarly dug in their heels, and it became a Bush/9-11 like “you’re either with us or the terrorists” situation. The opportunity for nuanced policy refinements was transformed into a zero-sum loyalty test.

This speaks, in my view, to the core tension of education in this country, as exemplified by Educated and Idaho. On one hand, effective schooling is integral to human freedom. Ignorance leaves us enchained. At times, a successful education will create some tension on the homefront, as students grapple with ideas that conflict with parental viewpoints, and that’s essential and has to be accepted. And if we aspire to be a country of opportunity, we have to make a quality education available to all. On the other, it’s clear at this point that educators lean Democrat, and that liberals tend to be more critical of traditional values and viewpoints. Sometimes we’re far too happy to bask in the glow of our own flashlights, blinding ourselves to other perspectives or concerns, or leaving tracers of our own beliefs that become super-imposed upon everything else we see. As offended as I am by the attacks on libraries and teachers in many parts of this country, I also recognize that there are ways in which we have earned some measure of mistrust.

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The light shined brightly upon me as I made the long march across Pocatello. With my airbnb positioned all the way on the north-end, I faced a three-hour journey through the city, crossing the lengthy railroad bridge into the historic center, and then crossing back over to move through sprawling commercial areas. Perhaps a few more regulations would be helpful–this humble pedestrian, in particular, would have appreciated some consistent sidewalks along major arterials.

Ultimately, though, I reached my basement unit, with two bags of groceries to keep me sated through my day off. I switched on all the lights, took in the large space, and relaxed. In the hours that followed, I would finally try to make sense of what I had seen over these past three days.