IDAHO SO FAR:
People here are unfailingly nice, polite and helpful. I mean like 1950's small town America polite and helpful. Please and thank you, excuse me, do you need help with that, let me get that door for you.
There's some MAGA stuff., but nowhere near what I'd expected to see. There's one MAGA barbershop and two MAGA houses, one here and one in Payette. A couple of bumper stickers. Some lingering 'fuck Biden' sentiment. I expected WAY more idiocy. Shit, Lynden WA has more MAGA shit. Bellingham had more, and it was liberal. Also, no open carry. At all. It's legal here, you just don't see it. You sure in shit saw it in Bellingham. As they say in America, 'Wow'.
Even though religion is very very very very very big here, not one single person has mentioned it. Not even at the super hard-shell Baptist Separatists separatist primary school thrift sale, and those women and their daughters were in full modesty garb. Not. A. Word.
The Mormons are big here. They have their own bank, they live out in the hills in fenced compounds comprised of huge McMansions, and the white SUV's with the blacked-out windows patrol the streets in the evening. Around the corner is a Brethren church (look it up Paco, you're sitting in front of the internet) and the Patriarch and his wife, both elderly, both in Plain Dress, have taken a long, slow stroll past to peek in and see what's up. Six blocks down is the Roadside Worship Revival church, which I'm assuming is some kind of Pentecostal set-up. Having had my fill of Ecstatic Religiosity, I intend to give their happy asses a wide berth. Two different Catholic organizations (one from Oregon, one from Idaho) compete for those who don't have enough guilt in their lives. Three blocks down is a Methodist church that I have yet to look into. Traditionally, Methodists have been LGBT friendly, but who knows what the fucks' up with these Idaho people.
...ooooh! Nations is gonna sell out! Well shit yes I intend to sell out. A bitch is new in town and I want to meet people. A nice, low-key communion out this way might be just the thing. I mean come on people, trust me, I'm gonna do my research. And it's not like I'm going to rock up in a Borsalino smoking a Petit Nobel and put my feet up on the seats.
OK maybe at the Brethren's.
The price of living is really, really low here in Idaho ,and it's even lower three miles away in Ontario Oregon (which is where everyone shops and buys legal marijuana to take back across the Idaho line and into the waiting arms of the police.) We've been able to assemble a nice little makeshift household for about 300.00 - and that includes all the absolute basics, like beds and sheets and a coffee maker and soap ffs. And groceries. Now that we're actually living in our apartment instead of a motel room, the flow of blood money going out is down to a trickle. Which is a damn relief.
The area we've moved to is called Fruitland because of all the gay people who live and work here in social harmonywith the rest of the residents of this humble rural garden spot
...in the early days this was allllllllll fruit trees. Nowadays trees are out and root crops are in, chief among them onions.
The onions are being harvested now. This entire town smells strongly of onions. It has for the past month. It does now. It smells like onions 24/7 - except when it smells like the decomposing onion gravy left in the beds of all the trucks and railcars.
Strongly. Nay, violently.
The local joke is 'Oh you get used to it after awhile and you just think 'Oh! Onion rings! *Tee hee!*
- except no. That does not happen. Honestly WTF. Nobody is looking up suddenly from their mundane tasks going 'Why I do believe I smells onion rings, senor!'
The good thing about this is, if you happen to be low on onions, just stand on the corner of 16th and Whitley (also known as Gayway Corners) and hold a sack open. They send out road trains full of onions from this place - three trailers long! Who is eating all these goddamn onions????
We are in the sagebrush steppe region of Idaho. It's generally hot and very dry, but here at the confluence of three rivers it's extremely green down along the water's edge and extending about a block inland. After that you need a little irrigation to get things rocking - and holy SHIT does it pay off. This is astounding growing country! Folks here, when they can be bothered to try, have incredible gardens. But as you drive through town you'll notice an interesting thing -You'll have a street lined with glorious Victorian homes and gardens, say, but one property in the row is neglected - and it will have reverted entirely back to bare gravel, sandspurs and sagebrush. It looks artificial, like one person decided to go all 'Boot Hill' with their property., but no, that is not the case. You can easily tell who in your neighborhood is a lazy chunk of fuck.
This is Louis L'Amour's' Old West. It looks exactly like every cowboy movie you've ever seen, except 'Midnight Cowboy'. There are buzzards and wagon wheels and horses and outhouses and tin shacks; horses everywhere, miles and miles of rolling grassland and round brown hills. There really are deer and antelope playing out there. Of course the ones I saw were splattered all over the highway, so not playing. Playtime was done. Still, you got real cowboys, real sheepherders, real farmers and an entire local culture based on generations of rural life. I never knew there was such a mindset. Some of these folks grew up with no electricity and no indoor plumbing - not because they were poor, but because they were remote. Imagine if the hippies had been common folk and not Berkeley college pukes. Imagine if their history went back generation after generation through cycles of agriculture and migration. You know how they say that the Celts are still migrating Westward? This is me, trying to be all deep and shit.
If you took the aroma of all the car air fresheners, all the punk aftershave, all the cheap deodorant and all the bargain laundry soap in America and mixed it in a huge vat, it would smell like every single indoor space in Central Idaho. This smell is following us around. From outdoor garage sales to the offices of the local telephone company, from McDonalds to El CameronMexican Restaurant, you smell this smell. Our apartment smells like it - I've been cleaning frantically trying to get rid of this smell. I got up at 3:00 AM two days ago and damp mopped the whole place, trying to get rid of it. It is wretched! It gets into your clothes and hair! Tomorrow we're going to be visiting one of the pot shops over on the Oregon side to see if they have any hardcore incense we can burn!
Honestly just incense. The cops on this side would pull our out of state plates over in a FLASH if we brought over any dank.
I like it here so far. Not the hot weather. The hot weather blows. That, I hate. But everything else is pretty good.
Of course,
I'D LIKE IT A LOT BETTER IF I HAD MY GODDAMN STUFF.
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