Twisp

It happens very quickly and very suddenly, a flash of memory usually of a place - and for no particular reason. Sometimes I have a photo which helps recall the memory, sometimes I have nothing or, as in this case, I took a picture a few minutes before.

This is a pull-in off US Route 97, somewhere near Okanogan in Washington State, in October 2008, when we were driving from Edmonton, Alberta, to Seattle to visit my brother. Gill and I sat on the edge of a pond and ate a light meal while we watched a muskrat going about his business. It was a few minutes in the weeks we spent in Canada and the US yet, somehow, today it jumped back at me.

We spent that night at Twisp, a small town just to the east of the Cascade Range. It seemed to represent everything that was enviable about American life, from the boardwalked stores to the slow-speaking but friendly people who lived....

....in enviable surroundings. It was fall, the aspen trees had turned and begun to shed their leaves, and we walked miles along trails without seeing another soul. We spent the night in a small cabin in a slightly run-down motel before....

....following Route 20 high into the Cascades, each turn of the road revealing a yet more magnificent panorama.

This road closes for much of the winter and we followed it shortly before that happened. The GMC Yukon we had hired was a brute of a car and not one that seemed at all suited to the conditions, yet I enjoyed the challenge of driving that frozen road surface.

Surely it should have been a picture of Twisp or the Cascades which I should have recalled so vividly, not a small roadside pond?