Evergreens blanket central Idaho, revealing nothing of the season. Grass dried the color of straw and the trickling Salmon River, emptied of summer recreators and the water which draws them, were our only clues of autumn. It could have been easy to forget the churning and grinding of the world beyond in this unspoiled setting—so far away from burning oil fields, bombed-out nightclubs, weapons silos, the halls of Congress. The motion of time itself seemed nonexistent. Staring into this wide stillness, sky an unruffled blue, we could have sat in silence; we could have chosen to forget.

It was Sept. 11, 2002, when my father and I drove through Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains on our seven-day journey from Phoenix to the Oregon coast. Among the words and phrases I hate to use, “Sept. 11” is singularly unavoidable. It designates actual time, like any standard “Monday” or “mid-month,” and will come to pass once a year forever more, as it has since somebody started counting. But now I want to strike it from my vocabulary for its overuse, its tension, its inevitable drumming-up of emotion—confusion, panic, dread, patriotic fervor, sorrow, exhaustion. I can’t get away with it. It is a real day.

The media hype of the anniversary, while not lost on us, had significantly less heft as the two-lane highway snaked over granite passes, into grass-filled river valleys and out of the radio’s reception range. We talked instead, about the shape of things, of looming threats and debts of trust, getting louder, in the custom of our Irish temperament. I relish debates with my father. Absurdly, something in the inflammation of our good-natured arguments comforts me, assures me we can communicate.

Mine is a unique situation. Father-daughter road-trips may not be the most common familial interaction, but when you’re 25 and your father is 83 very little has ever seemed normal. My dad was a grandfather four times over before I came along. He was born in 1919, I in 1977. We’ve always regarded each other with love and respect, but also a little bit like delegates of some alien race.

He frustrates easily, my dad. The radio, between intermittent static wash-outs, must have blurted out a statement about growing uneasiness among world leaders toward the Bush administration’s Middle Eastern policies, or some such fact-based comment, for he issued a forceful snort of disgust. My dad exhibits many fine qualities, but patient listening isn’t exactly one of them.

“Oh, come on Dad. This whole thing is such an awful mess, it makes me sick. I hate thinking about it,” I launched into some diatribe against the decision to back out of the Kyoto Accord, the administration’s abuse of global sympathy in the year since the towers crumbled, the motives of its arrogance.

He believes in the legitimacy of authority, of elected leadership—unless held by “horse’s asses” (dad-speak for Democrats). My wily declarations, by all accounts, should have set him off but drew only a sigh. “Why can’t we unite as a nation?” His tone was weary, and his remark emotionally indistinct, save for a weird blend of triumph and sadness. He recalled the rallying force behind America’s involvement in WWII after the Pearl Harbor attack. “Everyone,” he said, “everyone united and did what they could do for the war effort.”

My dad grew up in Eugene, Ore., with a gaggle of sisters and a single brother. They romped across grassy hillsides hoisting sticks as scepters, singing songs about King Tut. While the Great Depression shaped his teenage years, the open isolation of the West did more to affect his worldview. After graduating from college in June of 1941, getting a job and getting married seemed much more pressing engagements than the conflicts heaving overseas. A summer on the eastern seaboard, training with several other freshly hired insurance men from around the United States and Canada, roused my dad from his West Coast indifference. By September he knew that America couldn’t continue to “ride the fence.” Yet that’s precisely what he did, returning to Oregon, adjusting to a new job and a new marriage, living “in high clover” (to use another Dad-ism). He was barely 22.

The startling devastation of Pearl Harbor forced everyone into action, but not reluctantly, he stresses. He enlisted in the Navy, held an administrative position aboard the USS Houston touring the Pacific theatre, and spent a night adrift in Leyte Gulf while the ship listed and fumed and the sharks circled. I suspect now that he remembers the unified effort as not solely provoked by war or the violence that swept our nation into the fray, but something less definitive, some semblance of will, some general awakening.

“Well, that’s impossible now. Unity like that will never happen again,” I replied with a sourness and assurance belying my years. It was as if we had reversed roles. I set my jaw in a stony frown; he quietly yearned for a lost ideal.

I realize now why I hate mentioning Sept. 11. I hate it in the same way I hate examining the cause and need and toll of war. Terrorism can’t be just a buzzword ringing in my ears. No more than “God bless America” can stand as a justified or whole response. I hate ceding that the world is a dangerous, fitful place, full of desperation. The complexities overwhelm me, and in my most childish wishes they would all simply disappear.

I want to cry and shrink the world into something manageable, to be small and protected again. I call my dad with nothing to say. He tries to tell me that it’s always been this way: unstable, violent, changing. That it’s a fact I must accept as a part of growing up.

He says things like, “These are the problems of your generation,” which, at first, make me recoil in anger. How can I accept these burdens willingly, when I feel so broken by their causes? My dad has little trouble now accepting the tide of necessary force. He is not emotionless or jaded when he talks about the history of aggression in the 20th century, merely matter-of-fact. I struggle to comprehend necessary force, feeling its implications and inconsistencies outweigh its result. Displays of power unnerve me. I want world peace, but sense that it is an ideal as improbable as total unity, a phrase reserved for pageant contestants in bright birdlike dresses and waxy-looking news anchors weighing in on the “the next big threat”.

What changes in this world, this procession of complicated history? People cling to childhood, but the world shakes them loose. Again and again it forces us to cope with our nascent power, forces us to accept adulthood.

The other day a letter showed up from my dad. “I deplored the Korean War,” he wrote, “Vietnam, the Panama incursion, Grenada, the Gulf War, and even Belgrade, but I honestly don’t know what the alternative was.” It was sobering to see this admission; that he had internally resisted violence but been so outwardly incapable of dissent. “I deplore this war, too. But we’re in it and must go forward and make an honorable peace.” All politics and conspiracy theories aside, I agree with him, bristling with the determination that honor comes only from the individual. He goes on, “I hope your generation finds a better solution,” which I read with satisfaction and absorbed as a sort of confirmation of responsibility. And then he reminded me that I’ll always be his kid: “By the way—here’s a parent speaking. Have you kept up on your dental appointments?”