Rocks are good sign on road to tranquility

I went searching for the real Inland Northwest last week. The key: utilizing every one of the Seven Stages of Roads. Work your way through them in descending order: 1. The freeway. You start on the big, roaring, eight-lane behemoth. You’re assailed on all sides by RVs, by pickups pulling boats and by semitrucks on the way to Minnesota. You jam your vehicle into cruise control, at the maximum legal limit, in order to get to your exit as quickly as possible. Then, with a sigh of relief, you exit the hell off. 2. The state highway. You find yourself on a smooth four-lane road, a little prettier than the freeway. It’s almost as fast, too, except in those places where it becomes a smooth two-lane road, at which point you find yourself stuck behind an RV lumbering uphill with a driver who has apparently never, in his life, looked in his rearview mirror to check whether he’s leading a slow 16-car parade. You crawl your way to your turnoff and blow a fond kiss to Mr. 40-mph-RV Man. 3. Two-lane blacktop. You find yourself on a nice, twisty, little county road, not exactly engineered for speed. The turns aren’t banked and the shoulders are nonexistent. This is perfectly acceptable, because you have left behind the roaring traffic and most of the trucks, with the exception of the occasional logging truck. For the first time, you really enjoy the land you’re traversing: the flock of turkeys in the field, the deer near the road (a little too near), the fields of sweet hay and the blue-green sheen of the white pine stands. You whistle your way to your turnoff, marked by a sign you nearly miss. 4. The gravel road. You’re motoring through the hills and forests now, on a road that’s maybe a little dusty, maybe a little narrow. Yet it’s surprisingly smooth, thanks to a county or Forest Service grader, and it whisks you happily above indigo lakes and alongside chattering creeks. When you get behind another vehicle - a fairly rare occurrence - you may have to roll your windows up. But most of the time, you can zip along with your elbow out the window and the scent of tamarack and subalpine fir filling your car. Every so often, you slow for traffic, meaning you let a mother and her cubs cross in front of you. You skid your way past your next turnoff, and then perform a three-point turnaround to get back to the tiny little brown sign pointing to the next stage. 5. The rutted Forest Service road. You’re on a track with an official name like “F.S. 895689,” but you know by a more poetic name like the Mercury Mountain Road or the Pleiades Pass Road or the Beaver Hump Trail (poetry comes in many guises). You have to be careful of the numerous potholes, still brimming from yesterday afternoon’s thunderstorm. You also have to keep an eye out for the bowling balls that have rolled down from the cliff wall high above. You are glad that you brought your all-wheel-drive vehicle, because your city car would right now be high-centered on a rock the size of a recliner chair. Sometimes, you find yourself in the exhilarating position of looking straight down from your driver’s side window on a winding mountain creek, 1,000 feet straight down. You decide that 15 mph is plenty fast enough. This also makes it easier to find your next turnoff, marked by another small sign decorated with four bullet holes. 6. The backcountry Forest Service trail. Here’s where you park the vehicle and set off, sweating, around the shoulder of a small hill, over a notch in ridge, and down through a grove of fir and cedar. The traffic now consists of chipmunks and camp robbers. You swing your way along this trail to your next, and final, turnoff. 7. A trampled-down game trail beside a mountain stream. No road, no real track, just a cool walk along the cool bank. You sit down and let your feet dangle in a rocky pool. You breathe a little sigh of relief, because you have worked your way through all Seven Stages - and found exactly what you were searching for.