When I was a kid in Missouri one of the landmarks on the interstate between my hometown and my grandparents’ town was a huge wooden cutout of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. They were poised on the bluffs above the Missouri River, pointing upstream and dressed, perhaps inappropriately, as buckskinned Mountain Men.

Over the years the brown and yellow images flaked and faded and warped and, finally, tumbled onto the railroad tracks hundreds of feet below, where I like to imagine they were crushed under the wheels of a cultural progress they had begun some 175 years before. Irony through iron. Or, more probably, steel.

Today there is a similar image of the two men on the official signs marking the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, and it has been a more durable reminder throughout my life of what they achieved. I’ve seen it along highways in Missouri, of course, where the explorers started, and in Nebraska, which is at least connected to Missouri. But then it has surprised me out in the Dakotas, and then in Montana, where I’ve had to remind myself of their long story. In the slow and sporadic journey of my life, the signs have since shown up along Washington highways and, ultimately, in Oregon, where L&C finally came to the end of the continent and realized – joyously, as we know – that they didn’t need to go any farther.

From 1805 to 1806 their Corps of Discovery winter camped at what is now known as the Fort Clatsop National Memorial. (The fort is part of the larger Lewis & Clark National Historical Park – sites scattered up and down the Pacific Northwest coast.) At Fort Clatsop you can visit the little museum and learn interesting things, such as the fact that L&C were not the first Europeans to make contact with the natives there, who were pretty savvy traders. You can knock about in a reproduction of the fort the corps built, and then wander down to the Lewis & Clark River to see where they first landed their canoes.

For a long time that placid river was called the Netul, but like hundreds of sites across the West, it has been renamed for its famous visitors. It’s almost comical the number of towns, streets, natural formations and businesses between St. Louis and Astoria, OR, that bear the names of either Lewis or Clark or both. And ultimately it all seems inappropriate; even the Fort Clatsop site, stamped with the approval of the National Parks Service, doesn’t seem to get it quite right.

Because the places are all stationary. Lewis & Clark, when spelled with that ampersand, is a name for movement. Almost a verb. You’re closer to their legacy when you pass by the historic trail signs on the interstate than you are standing at any particular point along the way. But then you also have to laugh at yourself when you complain that it’s a long drive from Omaha to Yankton, though you’ll get there in a fraction of the time it took the corps to travel that far.

So go ahead and have a seat in the surprisingly spacious Fort Clatsop. You may not have done much to have earned a little rest, but others did who came before you, and you can take a breather in their honor.