DAYS 39 & 40 - Rexburg & St. Anthony, ID - 755 miles from home

I don't want to blend too many of our separate adventures into one blog post, but the last two days share a common host - the Upper Valley Catholic Community. We pilgrims spent two nights in two different churches in two different parishes, feeling the warm love of the broader Upper Valley community.

Given the centrality of pilgrimage in the Catholic imagination (think of the Camino de Santiago), touching base with traditional images and icons over the past two days has felt especially meaningful. I was particularly moved by the Stations of the Cross in the sanctuary at St. Patrick's in Rexburg.

The Stations of the Cross are fourteen images typically placed along a path or along the walls of a church. They allow a worshipper to move through space while contemplating and thereby reenacting, with their own footsteps, the passion of Christ. The Stations are a picture-book pilgrimage. I was reminded that pilgrims activate the deep truth of space and time, quilting together natural landscape, human footsteps and sacred meanings.

And so it has been for us, over these past 40 days, traveling west to east. Our pilgrimage has traced the Oregon Trail and the homestead movement in reverse - reminding us that this formidable terrain of desert and mountain was reshaped by conflict, collaboration, dominion.

More than anything else, these days I'm feeling the force of the human will. We homo sapiens bend the road, bend the land, to meet us. Mile after mile Bob and Kate and I are passing dusty, dry plains - that suddenly blossom out into fertile irrigated field, into the greens and golds and brick reds, the golf courses, the crops, the vibrant townships... as if the land were the blank canvas for the homesteader's brush.

The pilgrim's path is no less willful. We hurl ourselves from our sleeping bags at 4:30 a.m. to prepare for another day on the road. And yet, unlike the settler, the road bends us. History, sacred and secular, marks us. The land leaves its imprint on us.

Or so we earnestly hope.

We're heading for the Tetons. Within days we'll be crossing the Continental Divide.

St. Mary at St. Patrick's Catholic Mission in Rexburg, Idaho.

Strongly LDS, vibrant and growing, Rexburg is the 10th largest city in Idaho - a population of roughly 40,000.

Outside St. Anthony, Idaho.

Crystals, sage smudge sticks, even a few decks of Tarot at Roxy's in St. Anthony. The store, housed in an old "Roxy" Theatre, is just 2 weeks old.

Addison at Roxy's.

Henry Fork of the Snake River (at Beaver Dick campground, near Rexburg.)

Verdant Idaho, outside of Rexburg.

Horses grazing near Rexburg.

The smell of horses, the sweetly nibbled grass, the worn split-rail fence... A heart-easing path down Old Yellowstone Highway outside of St. Anthony, Idaho.