White. North Idaho.1984. We crept down the icy, curved, and steep road in my Subaru wagon. In the back seat was my three year old son, Jerome and his four year old friend, Shea.

“There is another way out of here, right?” I asked Denny.

When he said no, I looked around me at the foot of snow on the ground, sizing up the remote location.The kids wanted to know if we were there yet. The temperature was near zero and dropping. I realized that I should have brought more to eat than a few sandwiches and wished that I thought of some extra warm clothes.

I got out of the car to silence. The stillness was broken by the crunching sound of two locals, wearing crampons, coming down the hill behind us. Each carried a bag full of groceries.

“You’re here until spring,” one of them said.

.  A mild gust of wind blew snow off a nearby cedar branch. It floated down to me in slow motion. Somehow the glowing white beauty of these woods near Lake Pond Oreille felt oppressive.  

My mind wandered to my daily routine. Each evening after work, I turned the key of my car, in the dark parking lot behind my office in Coeur d’Alene. I always knew that it might blow up. The Aryan Nations white supremacist group was a small but troubling presence. My Jewish name might catch their attention. You had to be more than white to be in their club.  

Once, Bonnie Raitt played a concert in nearby Sandpoint, on what she called her Marlboro Tour. She looked down on the white crowd, multi-racial band by her side, and said, “What’s all this Aryan Nations bullshit?”

 

I had recently graduated from chiropractic school. All the preparation necessary to start a practice had been overwhelming. Being a Jewish kid from the east coast made it a little like blindly driving down an icy road.

“Let’s get a fire going in the cabin,” Denny said.

We drove half a mile on the level road to his family cabin and soon had a toasty fire going. The kids seemed safe and we needed to figure out what to do next. My suburban Philly roots hadn’t prepared me for this.  

I wasn’t sure that it was possible to get the car out, but decided to go for it. I gunned the engine and tried not to think about what the guy with the groceries had said. Denny was spotting me. I focused on the top of the hill. My white front wheel Subaru held the road and made it out first try.

We left the car up there and went back to the cabin with a feeling of relief. the white all around us now felt like a friend instead of enemy. After a day of playing in the snow with the kids, I felt profound relief as the four of us slowly drove to the plowed highway and looked down to black asphalt.