This is a long one. Settle in.
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WHERE HAVE I BEEN
I have been unpacking.
No shit, 5:AM to 9:PM unpacking and rearranging and organizing and sorting and boxing and un-boxing and FUCK.
It is a miracle I'm still married.
Going from 'Well, we probably just said goodbye to everything we own' to 'HOLY CRAP HERE IT IS' was a literal shock to the system. Fortunately, the two young men who arrived with the vanload were competent and professional - unlike their parent company - and our stuff was off the truck in less than an hour.
But then, of course, there it all was.
We lost three pieces - an end table, a desk, and a lamp, completely destroyed. Insurance? Why no. Any understanding of how cargo and transport actually operates? Oh Heavens no. Not us. Our shit moved from warehouse to warehouse all up and down the West Coast before it was tracked down and delivered. We went in ignorant, looking for a bargain, and got jacked up and jacked around. So it goes.
But the important things were untouched, and life can go forward now, and of course that's what matters. That and finding the asshole who crushed the desk my father-in-law built when he was in college and breaking his fingers.
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SO! WHAT IS IDAHO LIKE?
THERE IS A LOT OF ASS IN IDAHO.
When you are in Idaho, you will see a lot of ass. And it is bare-naked adult ass that you will see. And it is not the kind of bare-naked ass that you might see at Mr. Peenee's place, with firm, downy glutes like billlows on the ocean. No. Not like that at all. Idaho ass is like 200 lbs of blue cheese stuffed into a pair of nylons, and it has sweaty hair allllllll over it.
I have never seen so much casually displayed ass in my life and I grew up in the 1970s. This is not plumbers crack I'm talking about. Stop insisting that it is because it's not. Stop it. This is whole ass. The WHOLE entirety of the ass. Bare, bare ass being revealed like Esther Williams arising from the waters in Million Dollar Mermaid; inevitably, deliberately, coming out to play from ankles to tits as our man or woman bends over, and you wish I were exaggerating but sadly I am not. You can be in the grocery store, or the hardware store, or even casually waiting at a stoplight listening to some Robin Trower on your Sirius Radio and OH DAMN there it is, bending over on the side of the road and that ass is big, man, and it is damp and it is white, and that asscrack is HOO BOY AND THE LIGHT CHANGES
Sneak Attack Crack, is what it is. Damn, Idaho. Buy some suspenders.
Speaking of things you didn't ask to see, there is a fashion here among some of the post-Juggalo set where you pack yourself into a pastel tube of stretchy material meant for a much smaller and shapelier woman and then go out among your fellow beings with every crease, curl and wrinkle on casual display depending on the angle of the sun. Always women with Hatchet Man tattoos, and always built like a stack of rubber pumpkins. It can be really...it can be...
it's sort of...
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POLITE AND KINDLY
The VAST and OVERWHELMING majority of the people we have met and dealt with here have been fantastic. And normal. Not one single word about politics or religion, no attitudes, no weirdness at all. I truly mean that. We have been able to get established without a single hitch and it's thanks to the lovely people who assisted us at the DMV, the phone company, the real estate agency and others.
Just out in public there is a level of polite behavior going on that I haven't seen in a few decades. One thing that's been catching me up is the 'ladies first' mindset. Oh yes! Here, ladies go first. Particularly old ladies, and those of us who resemble them. Even in traffic! Like even an uncontrolled 4 - way out in the middle of noplace, you get motioned through! I had to take a second, but I finally worked it out, duh. OK. Don't mind if I do.
Little kids will get the door for you, and they smile at you and say 'Hi!' on the street. People offer to help you load groceries, and they mean it. Men and boys keep doing that little 'howdy ma'am' nod of the head at me if they happen to catch my eye in passing; and that one stopped me a few times. But it's a real thing out here. And that odd formal way that men talk to women in Westerns? That's a real thing too.
Everybody wants to chat. Chat is expected, too. I am not always in a chatty mood, so this has been an adjustment. I have a stock of inane observations now that I toss out whenever I'm at a loss. I smile so much my teeth dry out. Suddenly out of my distant past has come bubbling up all of these polite mannerisms and figures of speech, and hey, if it gets me through the day, who does it hurt? I want to be a good neighbor.
-thing is, I also want to go out in my damn Queen T-shirt and not get peered at like I'm swinging a dick inside these shorts. Good Lord people.
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PARANOIA
OK fine. Do I sound paranoid? Do you catch that thread? Because I am. I am paranoid. This is a whole different world here. A completely different world. I had no idea how different the culture would be. Shit, moving from Sumas to Bellingham was kind of a culture shock; this? is WILD. The desert, the climate, history, mindset...it's cut off, it's remote...
...shit, if the cities fall and the lights go out, I'll be stuck on the side of the river with all the Fundamentalists.
HELP.
Which leads me this next observation -
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I HAD NO IDEA HOW FUCKING BIG AMERICA ACTUALLY IS
Or how small the towns are in Idaho.
You see a map of the Northwest, and you look at Idaho, and there's the major cities, and all the highways marked out, and you think of it as being like what you're used to in terms of size. A major city is going to be like, say, Seattle or Portland. You're going to go through a lot of settled area, suburbs, farms, shit like that, going from town to town.
No.
What you go through in Idaho is a lot of NOTHING.
Not even farms.
What you drive through just getting to Idaho, from Washington and through Oregon, is also NOTHING.
Lots and lots of nothing.
No farms, no houses, for hundreds of miles.
Mountains. Prairies.
Hills.
Absolutely nothing at all.
Cross over to the East of the Cascade range and you hit what most of the American Landmass is like.
It's a lot of nothing.
The majority of the towns? Very small. Three blocks. A bend in the road. Shit, a place with a row of mailboxes next to a lone tree.
And nothing.
The town of Ontario Oregon is surrounded by NOTHING.
You drive up through nothing, and suddenly there is a town.
It looks big on the map. You expect at least, say, a town the size of Bellingham. But no. It's a place at a bend in the river where people have been living since the Stone Age, and it's the size of, say, Lynden WA. And I mean a very sparse, scattered Lynden. With goats.
Sagebrush, Rocks. Dust.
The Snake River is the boundary between Oregon and Idaho. It's an OK sized river. Like the Upper Willamette. Very deep and swift and full of fish striking the surface.
Here on the other side is Fruitland. Looks fairly big on the map.
It is not.
It's smaller than Sumas was, and again - a very scattered, sparse Sumas after the Apocalypse. Few trees. Little grass.
And one mile to the east, there's absolutely NOTHING.
You can generalize it thus: in a strip running north to south along the Snake river, from Weiser to Nyssa, there is roughly a two-mile wide strip of...something, with large trees and greeen grass and nice little h houses, to the East of which is absolutely NOTHING.
And there's patches all along that roughly thirty mile stretch that are absolutely NOTHING as well.
Just scrubland. Maybe a cell tower.
As you drive down the highway, you look to the West, and you see, across the river, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, Oregon.
Nothing.
Rolling hills.
Open rangeland.
Sagebrush.
Tan grass.
Rocks.
Lotta sky out there.
The small towns you come across, the ones you see marked on the map, are half-dead little places the size of Everson-Nooksack, if that, surrounded by NOTHING.
It explains an awful lot about the local character of the people, how isolated still, to this day, these small communities really are.
Shit.
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I have done my driving and asking around, and I have done my research online. remember how I used to bitch about Lynden Washington? Too many churches, not enough thinking?
Oh honey. OH HONEY. Here in Idaho EVERYWHERE is like that. Every religion represented here is the most extreme, or conservative, iteration of that religion. Idahoans like their religion on the controversial side, it seems.
The town of Fruitland where I live is just nine planned blocks surrounded by some meandering country properties, so say two miles long and a mile wide, this little area. We have no supermarket.
We do have:
A huge, expensive, private 'spiritually centered' grade school just down the block
The Calvary Church
Corpus Christi Catholic Church
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Fruitland Church of Christ
Highway Worship Center Revival
West Valley Free Methodist Church
Fruitland United Methodist
The Church of the Brethren
These are big churches. Lots of people attend them. Friday, Saturday and Sundays here are really quiet. Sometimes you even see people in modest garb and Plain Dress going to and fro.
This is a thing that Idaho is known for: extreme, extreme religious views. And open carry, which is so normal here you don't see it unless someone's actually packing a rifle (really. Seriously.) Maybe it all settles out like this: folks have to maintain a polite, publicly civil demeanor, with all these sharp doctrinal differences between them, or else an instant bloodbath takes place. I dunno. They're certainly all packed up for something.
So rather than relaxing into a state of blissful new citizenship, I am waiting for that other shoe to drop. I know me, and I know my mouth, and I know that other damn shoe is gonna fall.
Another thing that I am very aware of here: This is a mans world in Idaho. There are expectations of behavior in place for a woman my age, and on my best behavior I barely meet the minimum standard. The Biker says he's never known me to go so long without at least one 'motherfucker' in the wind, and he's right. Some primal survival instinct has come into play. I don't even have to think about it. I just don't swear in public now.
Now cross the river here and go into Oregon and I'm back home. Casual bad language is everyday. A distance of 3.6 miles and a world of change, man. It's the reason we moved here, to take advantage of this border economy. No taxes on goods in Oregon. But yeah, you can go down the road three miles to the town of Ontario Oregon and get an abortion, a bag of pot, say 'fuck' in public and wear your favorite 'Queen' t-shirt with nobody worrying about whether you stand up to pee. Ontario functions out here like a combination head shop - remote crossroad trading center in the Gobi Desert, while the Idaho side is the ...I don't know what the Idaho side is. The side where most of the people who do business across the river in Oregon come from, I guess.
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So far this is my take on this whole area. Most folks are friendly and fairly heavily tattooed. Mexican culture is very integrated into the scene. A lot of recent, new investment has taken place along this stretch of Idaho and the area feels like it's waiting for 'something' to happen...what, I don't know. It's prosperous here. There's jobs; and in fact we saw many signs of prosperity as we travelled. New businesses, new cars, new development everywhere. Wineries, orchards, vast fields of mint! of all things. Onions of course. Brussels sprouts, grain and lawn-grass seed crops. Big new warehouses and farm equipment, lots of trucks on the road. Very little squalor. I mean very little. New road work being done.
Not at all what either of us had expected. Not even close.
Talk about a leap into the unknown. Shit.
