“Bones heal, pain is temporary, and chicks dig scars.”
- Evel Knievel
What's the best cheeseburger you've ever had? Where was it? What was good about it? One of the top three Kendra and I ever had was at a lodge near Red Fish Lake in central Idaho. Kendra had mentioned to a couple of people she'd flown with that we were going up that way. Both of them had been there and with great enthusiasm, said we MUST have the cheeseburger at the lodge. You know how that goes. Sometimes recommendations live up to the hype, but often, not quite. Well, this one did. What made it so memorable? It would do no good for me to deconstruct the ingredients and try to explain the harmony with which they came together. You should never try and explain poetry. As you'd imagine, though, it had an outstanding bun. No cheeseburger can achieve greatness with a ho-hum bun.
A stupendous cheeseburger isn't the only reason we like Idaho. We've made a couple of trips there and had some good fun. Just outside of Boise there's a Birds of Prey sanctuary. We visited it before I'd had a stocking hat snatched off of my head by an owl. I might have paid closer attention if it had been after that crazy happening. They have every kind of raptor you can think of: eagles, owls, condors, hawks, and falcons. We met a peregrine falcon named “Gus.” They did some demonstrations with him. He was an impressive little guy with intense beady black eyes like Edgar Allan Poe. Did you know, the world's fastest creature is the peregrine falcon? They have clocked one in a dive at 242 MPH.
In Boise one visit, we discovered that a favorite band, The Weepies, were playing at The Knitting Factory just down the street from our hotel. Are you kidding? That's some good fortune, right there. We grabbed two tickets and had ourselves a time.
Heading up to Ketchum one morning, we drove right into the middle of a huge cattle drive on both sides of the road going in our direction. I'm not talking a City Slickers, dude ranch, cowboy fantasy camp kind of affair. This was the real thing, fully outfitted cowhands on horses herding 200-300 head northeast. I thought I spotted Rowdy Yates at one point. Maybe not.
In Ketchum we visited Hemingway's grave. We found it, after asking around, in a most ordinary cemetery on the town's edge. His stone was unremarkable, adorned only with a few scattered coins and a couple of whiskey bottles. He survived shrapnel wounds in WWI. A fractured skull, crushed vertebrate and a ruptured spleen and liver from two plane crashes in two days in Africa. Through other misadventures and hard living he defied anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, hepatitis, skin cancer and diabetes. All of those things he stared down, but he couldn't overcome the demons in his soul.
We drove down to Shoshone Falls once. Beautiful area. It's where Evel Knievel attempted to jump the Snake River Canyon in his steam powered skycycle in 1974. You can pull it up on Youtube if you want details. Standing there looking across that chasm to the other side and the river way below, it made me glad I lived at a time when there was someone that kind of crazy in the world.
Boise is a town with many enchantments and Idaho is a fine, fine state. It's also not very far from California and you know what that means. Good luck to them keeping their state affordable and not overrun.
Music:
Best Band: Built to Spill. Formed in Boise in 1992, these indie/alternative rock veterans are still at it.
Best Solo Artist: Call him a little bit folky, a little bit rock Americana, Josh Ritter is a veteran of that world. He was born in 1976 in Moscow, ID. He fell in love with music when he heard his parents' Bob Dylan album, Nashville Skyline. Not long after, he bought his first guitar at K-Mart. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio, majoring in neuroscience because that's what both his parents did. Writing songs is kind of neuroscience in a way, but he didn't like that kind of laboratory. He graduated with his own hybrid degree, “American History Through Native Folk Music.” He's had a steady career - 13 albums since his first in 1999. A side note, he married his first wife, fellow musician Dawn Landes, in Branson, MO in 2009. What's that story?
Wildcard: For the kids of the 60s, Paul Revere and the Raiders were a happenin' garage rock outfit from Boise, that held their own against the British invasion. In their campy matching outfits from the American Revolution, they made several appearances on Dick Clark's TV show, Where the Action Is. Their popularity soared from those, resulting in a string of groovy hits in that grooviest of decades.
Idaho music to share?