[Vision2020] Fictional Story: "She Lives In Idaho"

[Douglas Stambler]

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She Lives In Idaho
by Douglas Stambler 


Boise was not the original capital of Idaho. Actually, it was Lewiston. But some fools ran off with the important documents, and now Boise is the capital. And that’s where she lives, in Boise, Idaho. She had a long neck and slender hands. You never saw anyone like that in Boise. But there she was, doing her thing, living her life, having a little more patience than the rest of us, to finish everything she wanted to do. She wanted to live in Idaho, and so, she, lived, in Idaho. It was all that simple for her. She thought it - she did it. There wasn’t anything to plan about it. 

Idaho was more about place names than anything else. Everyone had a place, and everyone had a name. People in Nevada didn’t like that people in Idaho had places and names, too. You see, in Nevada, people chose to be nameless and always on the move. Idaho was nothing like Nevada: pretty, green and friendly. Nevada was nothing like Idaho: stable, traditional, real. All in all, Idaho was alive and livable: Nevada was dead and uninhabitable. But the story is already detailed enough. Let’s get back to the story line.

Natalie came from a foster home in Pasco, Washington. Her mother was from the Yakima tribe and her father was a coal miner from Pocatello, Idaho. If ever two ways could never meet, Natalie’s parents had been anyone’s fantasy for least-likely ethnic couple. But those were just her foster parents. Natalie’s skin was dark brown, an impossible color to get from either of her foster parents. And one of the worst colors for her to be in the State of Idaho. You couldn’t pick a worse color to be in Idaho than brown. And why she chose to live there was already dumbfounding to all her friends and relatives, who had left for greener pastures, years ago. And yet she stayed: Like Lewiston, waiting to be named the capital, as soon as Boise got tired of always being right.

* * * 

Part I: Natalie Before Married Life

Oh, she was quite the undisguised: always searching into things a lot more than they needed to be. She worked an overnight shift at the J.R. Simplot frozen vegetable packaging and processing plant. It was about thirty minutes from where she lived. And if that wasn’t too far, then she guessed neither was working the graveyard shift too hard. She had a good work ethic, but she was not prepared for those changes that marriage brings: the uplifted disposition; a flurry of new friends; peace-making with her brothers and sisters. She wasn’t ready, so she wasn’t looking. And she had no idea that her husband was not totally convinced that after all, she was still a colored person. But where else do they say colored but in 1960s documentaries? She was living a colorless existence. But then again, no one ever saw her during the day, because she was sleeping through the days all the way to evening again. And then she went to work: brown-skinned and unafraid. Even if the nazis marched i!
 n Coeur
 d’Alene, it didn’t capsize her total self-control: she was afloat, and then she met Marty.

Marty was an intern with county government. He checked the books, and later he wrote the checks. He made it up as he went along. He figured that if the city could do it, so could he. Gifted but troubled by his loneliness, Marty wandered aimlessly through his career: as if all people ever did was follow directions from other people. "Happiness was mine and no one else’s." He turned a lot of people off. But for the curiosity shown to him by Natalie when they first met, his personal philosophy that he was the only one entitled to happiness, somehow made him endearing to others. And so, they were engaged.

Part II: The Idaho Potato

Late one night at the Winco Supermarket, seven potatoes leapt from their bag, and spilled onto the plainly tiled supermarket floor. The Idaho Potato: colorless and unafraid. Who could be the best potato in the whole state? Would it be the potato with the least bumps? Or would the spud with the least mud prevail? If all was well at the University of Idaho that year, then there would be a multitude of spuds, nay, a plurality of spuds! Spuds of every race, creed and color. Spuds from yellow buds; spuds from big old buds; spuds from Heaven! A true, Idaho harvest of the funnest spuds ever to push through the murky ground.

Winco’s front doors opened, and out jumped a spud! A large, older spud with a lot of personality, leapt up into the air and landed right on someone’s radio antenna, on their car, in the parking lot. "WSPUD! All Idaho potatoes, twenty-four and seven days of the week! You want color? I give you Spuds McGraw, color commentator from the rolling hills of the Palouse Country! That’s right, Pah-louse. It means POTATO in Indian language. Uh-hunh." The other six potatoes roll into the near empty parking lot, while the head spud broadcasts from the antenna of a Ford 350, sitting there in a parking space, wearing a stolen headlight.

"Like a bridge over truh-uh-bled wa-ters…" Strains of Simon and Garfunkel end up fighting like twin rivals, instead of the popular spuds they really are.

When you mash an Idaho potato, they is all the same color!

Part III: Homesteaders In Challis

It has been said of Challis that all the homesteaders there were bumped over from Montana: That’s good country. Swollen with mountains, but good country in less time. Idaho took forever to build! But Montana just surfaced. Try going to Challis some time, and see for yourself. There’s an old lady, been born in Challis, raised up nine children without a washer and dryer. Now there’s Quentin Tarantino and some tight-shirt rapper, but there used to be old granny over here, now just a wax statue in the "Challis, Idaho Historical Wax Museum." But you know the homesteaders? Right? They came to Challis with purpose, with vision. They came, because they had to. They came, because they were the original homesteaders. They were not like burned-out, first generation Californians in Boise, trying to find an Albertson’s with less than 9 people in the checkout line!

Boy, granny could really split that wood. I wonder how she learned to do that. How come she got all those Shoshone/Bannock skulls, all piled up in her dining room closet? Because, she was an original homesteader in Challis. And homesteaders rule, baby, rule! No one gonna beat granny with a stick! She 80 years old, and ready to die. Don’t bury the past. Just build on top of it, maybe no one will notice. Maybe we can make the books forget who was here first: I think you call them Native Americans. And who cares, anyway? We got highways. We got a governor named Dirk. We goin’ places. We gonna be famous, granny! And we gonna win, cuz we love to win.

Ida-shmo. Help me tell the difference between kindness and necessity. How much love can you fit in the State of Idaho?

A whole bunch of love.

Let’s start filling Idaho with love, sweet love.

* * * 

Natalie’s done for today. She packages some mixed vegetables, removes her latex gloves and heads into the Boise dawn. The city is still quiet. Natalie gets in her car, and drives home to Marty, who is sleeping and dreaming of Chief Joseph. She locks the door behind her, once home, and falls asleep next to Marty. She whispers to him in a long-ago lost language of Native Americans. He dreams of Joseph; she chants in Nez Perce. And she lives in Idaho. It breathes her. She doesn’t even associate too many things with the state, but Idaho breathes Natalie, like a puppy on a first walk: Like a metaphor short of syllables, but long and groaning - like a history book with multiple choice answers to questions they talk only about at pow-wows in the woods. And so I dream of Idaho, too, like it will be, once was, and again it can. Will overthrow the time lost and surrendered to highways and stolen documents. Even if it’s just a mention of the justice of the land to a man named Joseph on!
  the
 street in Moscow, Idaho - where Joseph is not there, but also bigger than the town in spirit. She lives in Idaho, and Idaho lives no more.

* * * 




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<STRONG>She Lives In Idaho<BR></STRONG>by Douglas Stambler <BR><BR><BR>Boise was not the original capital of Idaho. Actually, it was Lewiston. But some fools ran off with the important documents, and now Boise is the capital. And that’s where she lives, in Boise, Idaho. She had a long neck and slender hands. You never saw anyone like that in Boise. But there she was, doing her thing, living her life, having a little more patience than the rest of us, to finish everything she wanted to do. She wanted to live in Idaho, and so, she, lived, in Idaho. It was all that simple for her. She thought it - she did it. There wasn’t anything to plan about it. <BR><BR>Idaho was more about place names than anything else. Everyone had a place, and everyone had a name. People in Nevada didn’t like that people in Idaho had places and names, too. You see, in Nevada, people chose to be nameless and always on the move. Idaho was nothing like Nevada: pretty, green and friendly. Nevada was nothing !
 like
 Idaho: stable, traditional, real. All in all, Idaho was alive and livable: Nevada was dead and uninhabitable. But the story is already detailed enough. Let’s get back to the story line.<BR><BR>Natalie came from a foster home in Pasco, Washington. Her mother was from the Yakima tribe and her father was a coal miner from Pocatello, Idaho. If ever two ways could never meet, Natalie’s parents had been anyone’s fantasy for least-likely ethnic couple. But those were just her foster parents. Natalie’s skin was dark brown, an impossible color to get from either of her foster parents. And one of the worst colors for her to be in the State of Idaho. You couldn’t pick a worse color to be in Idaho than brown. And why she chose to live there was already dumbfounding to all her friends and relatives, who had left for greener pastures, years ago. And yet she stayed: Like Lewiston, waiting to be named the capital, as soon as Boise got tired of always being right.<BR><BR>* * * <BR><BR><EM>P!
 art I:
 Natalie Before Married Life</EM><BR><BR>Oh, she was quite the undisguised: always searching into things a lot more than they needed to be. She worked an overnight shift at the J.R. Simplot frozen vegetable packaging and processing plant. It was about thirty minutes from where she lived. And if that wasn’t too far, then she guessed neither was working the graveyard shift too hard. She had a good work ethic, but she was not prepared for those changes that marriage brings: the uplifted disposition; a flurry of new friends; peace-making with her brothers and sisters. She wasn’t ready, so she wasn’t looking. And she had no idea that her husband was not totally convinced that after all, she was still a colored person. But where else do they say colored but in 1960s documentaries? She was living a colorless existence. But then again, no one ever saw her during the day, because she was sleeping through the days all the way to evening again. And then she went to work: brown-skinned !
 and
 unafraid. Even if the nazis marched in Coeur d’Alene, it didn’t capsize her total self-control: she was afloat, and then she met Marty.<BR><BR>Marty was an intern with county government. He checked the books, and later he wrote the checks. He made it up as he went along. He figured that if the city could do it, so could he. Gifted but troubled by his loneliness, Marty wandered aimlessly through his career: as if all people ever did was follow directions from other people. "Happiness was mine and no one else’s." He turned a lot of people off. But for the curiosity shown to him by Natalie when they first met, his personal philosophy that he was the only one entitled to happiness, somehow made him endearing to others. And so, they were engaged.<BR><BR><EM>Part II: The Idaho Potato</EM><BR><BR>Late one night at the Winco Supermarket, seven potatoes leapt from their bag, and spilled onto the plainly tiled supermarket floor. The Idaho Potato: colorless and unafraid. Who could be !
 the best
 potato in the whole state? Would it be the potato with the least bumps? Or would the spud with the least mud prevail? If all was well at the University of Idaho that year, then there would be a multitude of spuds, nay, a plurality of spuds! Spuds of every race, creed and color. Spuds from yellow buds; spuds from big old buds; spuds from Heaven! A true, Idaho harvest of the funnest spuds ever to push through the murky ground.<BR><BR>Winco’s front doors opened, and out jumped a spud! A large, older spud with a lot of personality, leapt up into the air and landed right on someone’s radio antenna, on their car, in the parking lot. "WSPUD! All Idaho potatoes, twenty-four and seven days of the week! You want color? I give you Spuds McGraw, color commentator from the rolling hills of the Palouse Country! That’s right, Pah-louse. It means POTATO in Indian language. Uh-hunh." The other six potatoes roll into the near empty parking lot, while the head spud broadcasts from the antenna!
  of a
 Ford 350, sitting there in a parking space, wearing a stolen headlight.<BR><BR>"Like a bridge over truh-uh-bled wa-ters…" Strains of Simon and Garfunkel end up fighting like twin rivals, instead of the popular spuds they really are.<BR><BR>When you mash an Idaho potato, they is all the same color!<BR><BR>Pa<EM>rt III: Homesteaders In Challis</EM><BR><BR>It has been said of Challis that all the homesteaders there were bumped over from Montana: That’s good country. Swollen with mountains, but good country in less time. Idaho took forever to build! But Montana just surfaced. Try going to Challis some time, and see for yourself. There’s an old lady, been born in Challis, raised up nine children without a washer and dryer. Now there’s Quentin Tarantino and some tight-shirt rapper, but there used to be old granny over here, now just a wax statue in the "Challis, Idaho Historical Wax Museum." But you know the homesteaders? Right? They came to Challis with purpose, with vision. The!
 y came,
 because they had to. They came, because they were the original homesteaders. They were not like burned-out, first generation Californians in Boise, trying to find an Albertson’s with less than 9 people in the checkout line!<BR><BR>Boy, granny could really split that wood. I wonder how she learned to do that. How come she got all those Shoshone/Bannock skulls, all piled up in her dining room closet? Because, she was an original homesteader in Challis. And homesteaders rule, baby, rule! No one gonna beat granny with a stick! She 80 years old, and ready to die. Don’t bury the past. Just build on top of it, maybe no one will notice. Maybe we can make the books forget who was here first: I think you call them Native Americans. And who cares, anyway? We got highways. We got a governor named Dirk. We goin’ places. We gonna be famous, granny! And we gonna win, cuz we love to win.<BR><BR>Ida-shmo. Help me tell the difference between kindness and necessity. How much love can you fit !
 in the
 State of Idaho?<BR><BR>A whole bunch of love.<BR><BR>Let’s start filling Idaho with love, sweet love.<BR><BR>* * * <BR><BR>Natalie’s done for today. She packages some mixed vegetables, removes her latex gloves and heads into the Boise dawn. The city is still quiet. Natalie gets in her car, and drives home to Marty, who is sleeping and dreaming of Chief Joseph. She locks the door behind her, once home, and falls asleep next to Marty. She whispers to him in a long-ago lost language of Native Americans. He dreams of Joseph; she chants in Nez Perce. And she lives in Idaho. It breathes her. She doesn’t even associate too many things with the state, but Idaho breathes Natalie, like a puppy on a first walk: Like a metaphor short of syllables, but long and groaning - like a history book with multiple choice answers to questions they talk only about at pow-wows in the woods. And so I dream of Idaho, too, like it will be, once was, and again it can. Will overthrow the time lost and
 surrendered to highways and stolen documents. Even if it’s just a mention of the justice of the land to a man named Joseph on the street in Moscow, Idaho - where Joseph is not there, but also bigger than the town in spirit. She lives in Idaho, and Idaho lives no more.<BR><BR>* * * <BR><BR>
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