CAR and Driver - March 2017

The Columnists

John Phillips

Last month I drove our Honda

Pilot to a resort in Ashton, Idaho,

to fish on the Henry’s Fork. The

route led me through the Idaho

National Laboratory, home of the

Experimental Breeder Reactor-I,

not to mention Mud Lake and

Atomic City. I am still glowing.

I wound up shelling out about $100 for
every trout I caught, although a 22-inch
brownie—“six kinds of awesome,” said the
guide—induced a kind of fiscal amnesia.
But then it began snowing, so I opted to
drive home via the quickest route. The
Honda’s nav system sug-
gested U.S. 20 north, then
west on Idaho’s Fort Henry
Historic Byway. The byway,
marked as “scenic,” would
lead to the village of Spencer
and the U.S. Sheep Experi-
ment Station, both on I-15. I
estimated that the by way
was perhaps 25 miles long.
The road started out fine, paved and
every thing, with maybe three inches of
snow and exactly no human beings. I knew
when the pavement ended because the Pilot
[see Long-Term Test, p. 074] leapt six
inches sky ward after fording what I later
learned had been a small stream. After that,
there was just mud, interrupted by gravel
swales and potholes the size of kiddie pools.
In some places, the snow eradicated the
road altogether. I can’t remember exceed-
ing 12 mph. An ugly front rolled in, with
purple clouds rear-ending each other on
the Centennial Mountains a couple miles
north. The Pilot’s altimeter indicated I
was never below 5500 feet. The GPS
showed a little icon resembling a dung
beetle spinning in circles on a blank brown

field of, well, excrement, it seemed to me.

Occasionally the road was visible

almost to the horizon, a mile or two of cold

nothingness to let me obsess on the appar-

ent cessation of life as we know it. In places,

I saw not so much as an abandoned barn or

outbuilding. Sometimes there

weren’t even barbed-wire

fences. No signs. My sense of

critical distance collapsed.

In theory, there should have

been one village—Kilgore—

but it apparently was a gassy

aneurysm in some cartog-

rapher’s stand-up routine.

“W here’s Kilroy?” came to

mind. Also death came to mind.

I had set out at noon. Now it was near-

ing two thirty. A Dodge Ram dualie with

snow chains came splashing in the opposite

direction. “Does this road connect to I-15?”

I asked the driver. “Eventually,” he

responded, his wife looking as if she’d only

recently been let out of a box. “Is the road

passable?” I asked. He thought about that

for way too long, then said, “I suppose” and

clanked away in a fog of diesel fumes.

The Pilot was now coated in more gritty

sludge than the average Louisiana swamp

buggy. Not one piece of metal or glass was

visible beyond the B-pillars. The rear wiper

just skated over a hardening crust of opaque

sediment. No one could see my brake lights,

but there was no one to see them anyway. So

much crud collected in the wheels that I felt

a paint-shaker imbalance coming on. The

left-rear door was sealed shut.

It became so dark that I switched on the

high-beams. I think there were six warning

lights glowing on the Pilot’s IP. I felt as lost

as Robinson Crusoe’s cat and was swallow-

ing the acidic bile of panic every couple min-

utes, contemplating how I’d fumbled into

this monochromatic Black Mirror. I drove

another 60 minutes—now 3.5 hours total—

with road and weather conditions morphing

from merely awful to approximately appall-

ing. I crested a small hill and fetched up

against maybe 250 cows standing inert,

blocking passage. We—them, me—all

expressed the same look of wonderment. I

nudged the Pilot through the herd slow-

ly—a kind of black-and-white parting of the

Red Sea. I tell you, it is sobering to see an

animal’s head as big as a microwave oven

only two inches from your nose. Then I

encountered a full-fledged Marlboro man in

Carhartts, leather chaps, crap-splattered

Stetson, and what looked like—I swear—an

Hermès silk scarf around his neck.

“Am I near I-15?” I pleaded, revealing a

few sharp misalignments in my psyche.

“Wow,” he responded as he casually

scanned the Pilot, which by then was a mas-

sive molten fondue of mud. “You drove the

whole thing, didn’t you?”

I’ve encountered such black-hole vor-

texes before. I once flew to Ottawa,

Ontario, for instance, and rented a Dodge

Charger mid-blizzard. I immediately got

lost and wound up in Hull, Quebec—wrong

side of the river, but close—where no

human beings were on display. Nuclear

winter, I thought. So I dashed into a

McDonald’s, almost hugging the clerk, then

asked, “W here’s Ottawa?”

Crickets, as they say. Her face was blue,

as if she might be low on oxygen.

“Ottawa,” I repeated, using more vol-

ume. “It’s the capital of your country.”

She turned and said something in

French to the staff, who all stared, fingers

poised to tap out 9-1-1.

W hen you see “scenic” on a map, it does

not necessarily mean it should be seen.

26. CAR AND DRIVER. MAR/2017