B005S8O7YE EBOK (37 page)

With water of prime importance in the arid West, this property was unusual in having more than enough to supply the dwellings and irrigate the fields. The Salmon River, though not adjacent, was close by. A sizable creek that ran past the buildings was warmed by hot springs that originated on federal land upstream along a geological fault line. A hot spring on the property flowed from a hillside into an upper pool that emptied into a lower pool. The effluent from the lower pool coursed into the creek, which met the Salmon River with a stunning display of cascading waterfalls at the confluence.

When we had completed our tour of the property I told the seller that private ownership of the road was very important to me. She said the road outside the ranch was public, and because she and her husband had run a business that served the public, they had left the ranch gates open most of the time. However, she assured me that the road within the ranch was private and open to the public by permission only. She and her husband had affirmatively asserted their private ownership by locking the gates at least once a year.

The place seemed perfect for our needs. Due diligence was the next step. After my Boise attorney confirmed that all water and mineral rights were in order and the road within the property was private, I made an offer, the sellers accepted, and I became the owner of a ranch in central Idaho.

We moved out of Burgdorf on Friday, June 26, 1981. I had always known our stay was finite, but as I watched the last dilapidated gray wooden building recede in the rearview mirror, I could almost feel the rush of air as Father Time slammed the door behind me. If only it had been a literal rush of air. Our progress
on the winding dirt roads was too slow to generate even a small breeze. Our caravan consisted of Rick’s 1955 Dodge pickup, my Jeep Cherokee, the CJ5 that Sherry had driven on Robie Creek, a one-ton silver truck, and a two-horse trailer. Rick’s brother drove Silver, and a friend of his drove the CJ. Though a crow could have covered the distance in a couple of hours, it took us the better part of a day to arrive at our destination. By the time all the vehicles, people, dogs, cats, goats, horses, and mules had passed through the log portal leading to the residential compound, everyone was hot, dusty, and thirsty.

The compound consisted of the main building, three medium-sized buildings, and eight small cabins. All were constructed of logs and had red shingle roofs. The seller had told us that in addition to serving as her family’s home, the main building had functioned variously as a stagecoach stop, a restaurant, an inn, and a lodge. We parked along the road that curved alongside the main building and turned off our vehicles. As the dust drifted away, I found the complete absence of motor noise a welcome contrast to the relentless racket of the previous ten and a half hours. But the quiet didn’t last long. Rick got out of his truck and began to unload the horses and the goats while the rest of us opened various vehicle doors. Dogs, cats, and children leapt out of confinement and scattered in all directions in search of water. The dogs and cats headed straight for the creek. Rick tied the goats and equines to a conveniently located hitching post, then he, his brother, his friend, the children, and I drank from a garden hose attached to a tall outdoor standpipe with a pump handle that, when lifted, released a flow of water. After we had slaked our thirst Rick led the horses, mules, and goats into a nearby pasture to graze while I filled a metal tub with water for them. After releasing the animals, Rick brought the horses’ lead ropes back to the trailer, pointed to the main building, and directed Levi and Molly to start carrying their things inside.

“There?” I asked, daunted by the building’s immensity.

“That’s where we’re going to live,” he said, and went off to unload the saddles and other tack.

The lodge was approximately seventy-five hundred square feet, with six bedrooms upstairs and as many rooms downstairs. I knew that the previous owners had run a restaurant, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when my first view of the huge commercial kitchen revealed oversized pots and pans, a professional mixer on a stand, a walk-in refrigerator, an ancient wood cookstove with two ovens, an eight-burner gas stove with two more ovens, a large upright freezer, and a pizza oven, all of which the owners were leaving behind. After having lived for three years in a very small cabin, I was intimidated by the magnitude of the kitchen, let alone the entire house.

During our prepurchase visit I had envisioned us living in the two-story cabin 150 feet up the creek from the lodge. It had two good-sized bedrooms upstairs and an open area downstairs that could work as a kitchen, dining area, and living room. A covered porch off the living room overlooked the creek. Large windows in every room would bring every season of the great outdoors inside. While Levi and Molly were exploring the lodge, I asked Rick to walk over to the creek cabin with me. We stood on the porch while I tried to explain why I thought we should live there. My impassioned advocacy for the creek cabin may have been driven in part by my realization that someone would have to clean all twelve rooms in the lodge, and I knew exactly to whom that job would default.

I said, “If we lived here we’d have this wonderful view of the creek.”

But Rick had already made up his mind.

“You’ll want all that room when the rest of your family comes to visit.”

I was not unfamiliar with “good for the children” as an argument in favor of something my husband or boyfriend wanted, but Rick’s point was valid. I watched him stride back to the lodge and lingered for one last look at the creek.

Then I turned, walked quickly through the cabin, and headed toward the Cherokee to unload boxes of food into my humongous new kitchen.

T
he first mining operation in the Boulder–White Cloud Mountains reportedly began when a miner named Robinson filed a placer claim on a tributary of the Salmon River in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century. The claim became known as Robinson’s Bar (the name was later changed to Robinson Bar). With hand tools and shovels wielded mostly by Chinese immigrants, Mr. Robinson installed an extensive network of ditches and sluice boxes to divert water from the creek for the purpose of extracting gold. Remnants of those ditches still exist at that ranch.

A placer is a natural concentration of heavy minerals (such as gold) deposited by gravity and water. Placer mining involves the use of water to separate the heavier minerals from lighter materials such as sediment or sand. Panning, sluicing, and dredging are all methods of placer mining.

“Placer” was one of many words I learned in my adopted state, where folks speak the same language as the rest of America—and yet not. Some words have different meanings in the Wild West than, say, on the South Side of Chicago, where “draw” could be a
tie game between the Cubs and the Phillies, or it could be something an artist does. In Idaho a draw is the place between two hills down which water flows.

In common usage, reference to a draw is made in the late fall when a man holding a rifle says, “Y’see that big bull elk up that draw?”

“What drawer?” I asked the first time I heard a hunter use the word. I was imagining the place in my bureau where I kept my socks.

“See’m up there?” he said, using the barrel of his rifle to indicate a standing dead tree toward the top of the hill. “He’s right behind that snag.”

After puzzling for a moment over how a pulled thread on a sweater could obscure a bull elk, I queried, “Snag? Where?”

The hunter pointed again to the standing dead tree, behind which were some branches. Suddenly some of the branches moved. They were the rack of the aforementioned bull elk, which had no sooner moved than the hunter raised his rifle, aimed, and Kaboom!! Suddenly the elk was no longer behind the snag up the draw. It was good luck for the elk (though not for the hunter) that the hunter had missed. When last seen (at least by me) the elk was bounding up the hill with his rack and the rest of him intact.

In New York I had always understood a bar to be a place where you ordered whiskey, and a bench to be where you sat while you drank it. In Idaho, a bar is a flat piece of land along a creek or a river, and a bench is a larger flat piece of land higher up, not necessarily near water. In the context of mountains, “flat” can mean anything between horizontal and steeper than the face of a cow.

Not to put too fine a point on it, in Idaho a bar can also be a place where you order whiskey and a bench something you sit on while you drink it. The town in which I vote has several of both kinds of bars and benches within the space of a quarter mile.

To keep things fair and balanced, a future lesson could cover subway etiquette and priority positioning for hailing a taxi on Broadway in inclement weather. Hint: the optimum position is in front of a person who is already trying to hail a taxi, unless he or she is wielding a large umbrella, in which case you’d be better off looking for a bench in a bar.

Then there’s the meaning of bar as in lawyer, and bench as in judge.

A
mong the first things Rick and some of his friends did after we moved in was to repair pasture fences and secure the coop, which we promptly filled with chickens. The coop had a small enclosure so the birds could range safely outdoors during the day. We were the delighted beneficiaries of the hens’ efficiency (with essential help from the rooster) in converting leftover food waste into eggs that tasted bright yellow compared to the bland off-white flavor of eggs from corporate poultry. The horses, mules, and goats must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven with all that space and grass. Our domestic cats stalked and pounced on rodents while our dogs chased the cats, the rodents, each other, and the feral barn cats we had inherited.

My children’s and my activities that summer included unpacking boxes, cooking for ourselves and Rick and all the men helping him, eating, washing dishes, housecleaning, laundry, riding horses, milking goats, gathering eggs, hiking, gardening, baking, canning, swimming in the creek, and swimming in the pool. Rick’s activities included swimming as well as equine care, building, repairing various structures, and oversight of other people’s activities. It was
a lot of work, but the results were commensurate with the amount of effort expended, as opposed to the naked, heartfelt labor an artist can put into a project for months or years only to watch it go unappreciated by an indifferent public.

Charlie had just moved to a Los Angeles suburb with good public schools. Toward the end of the summer we agreed that it was time for Molly, now nine, to return to the public school system. Levi would stay in Idaho with me. Rick’s friend Che, now called Richard, would live in the caretaker cabin with his son, who was the same age as Levi. I would homeschool both boys.

During the summer we had spread out and occupied most of the rooms in the lodge, but when I returned from delivering Molly to Charlie in late August (a delivery only slightly less painful than her birth) the cooler morning temperatures made it clear that we were going to have to contain ourselves in a smaller space within the lodge. The roof was poorly insulated, and there were too many cracks between the logs to chink them all before winter. Rick hung blankets over doorways to close off most of the rooms in the house. Our family would occupy two bedrooms above the kitchen, laundry room, and dining room. As with the multipurpose room in our cabin at Burgdorf, we would eat, read, sew, do crafts, and conduct lessons in the dining room. There was an indoor bathroom off the laundry room—two amenities for which I was very grateful. Though I already missed Molly, I knew she would thrive in California with her father. I had adapted to the size of the lodge and felt completely at home there. I was so glad to find peace and contentment in my new environment that I was unaware of a developing situation that would make it increasingly difficult to retain that perspective.

The seller had told us that a couple in their sixties, Thurlo and Dorothy French, were the social center of a small group of summer homeowners four miles downriver. A couple of days after we
moved to the ranch we had driven down to meet the Frenches and let them know that although I was planning to lock my gates, they and their immediate neighbors were welcome to drive through, and so were their guests. As Rick handed the paper with the combination to Thurlo, Dorothy surprised me by saying, “I’ve been listening to your
Tapestry
album for years. I just
love
your song ‘Beautiful’!”

“Well, aren’t you nice to say that!” Then, quickly, to take the focus off me, I said, “Your home is so lovely. Did you build it or was it already here?”

Dorothy was more than happy to talk about herself and her home. Our conversation continued along typical lines of new neighbors getting to know each other. The Frenches were so pleasant and hospitable that on the drive back upriver I remarked, “Aren’t we lucky to have such agreeable neighbors!”

Our home lay along the Salmon River between Stanley (pop. 100) and Clayton (pop. 26). Farther downriver was the county seat, Challis (pop. 2,500).
^*
In order to acquaint ourselves with our new community we had subscribed to the local weekly, the
Challis Messenger
. One popular column reported that this family had motored to Idaho Falls to welcome a new granddaughter and that family had driven to Salmon to visit an aging parent. Another column gave gardening tips while waxing poetic about seasonal changes in Round Valley and the surrounding mountains. There were obituaries, church news, 4-H Club news, and school news. I was inspired to characterize the writer of each letter to the editor with a simplistic, wholly subjective formula: if a writer expressed an opposing view she was opinionated; if he agreed with my view he was impassioned.

The sheriff’s report detailed a bleaker side of the community.
One of the most common incidents, particularly in winter, involved someone driving off the road into the river. Local residents had a saying: “There’s two kinds of people ’round here: them that’s driven into the river, and them that’s gonna drive into the river.” I had no wish to be included in either classification. More often than not, an excessive intake of alcohol by someone was involved. With three bars in Clayton and a handgun in just about every household, violence sometimes erupted in the form of a shooting. Sometimes the consequences were deadly. A few months after we moved in, a woman living a few miles upriver was arrested and later convicted of killing her husband with a shotgun.