Idaho

An Idaho kind of place.

Pretty much every summer we go to Idaho for a week or two. Many of our friends in Florida find this baffling.

"Isn't that just pig farms?" they say, because they are thinking of Iowa, which also starts with the letter "I" but is a completely different state.

"Not Iowa," we say. "Idaho."

"Oh," they say. "Isn't that just potato farms?"

"Yes!" we say, because we don't want any more people finding out about Idaho.

For the record, Idaho does have a lot of potatoes. In fact the license plates on many Idaho vehicles make the following boast:

On New Year’s Eve Idaho rings in the new year with a Potato Drop in Boise, which features the raising, then lowering, of the World Famous GlowTato, a 3,000-pound glowing fiberglass potato. This ceremony broadcasts the proud message from Idaho to the world: “We have a very big potato.”

But in addition to potato farms, Idaho contains large quantities of nature in the form of scenery. Here is one random photo out of the approximately 19,000,000,000,000,000,000 photos of Idaho scenery I have taken:

I took this photo on a hike near a place called Galena. There's a little place there called the Galena Lodge where sometimes you can get a loaner dog to take with you on your hike. We got a loaner dog named Bentley.

Bentley is a Cairn Terrier, which is the same breed as Toto from the "Wizard of Oz" movie. He's built like a mailbox with Vienna sausages for legs. He is a very good boy. At one point on our hike we came to a fork in the trail, and Bentley went to the right, but we humans thought we were supposed to go left. We tried to get Bentley to follow us, but he refused. He just stood there staring at us with an expression that clearly said "I LIVE here, you morons." Finally we gave up and followed him, and of course it turned out he was correct, although he never said another word about it.

Bentley seemed to enjoy the hike, except for one meadow where he sort of got stuck in the tall grass, and I had to give him a lift.

If you're ever in Galena and looking for a hiking companion, ask for Bentley. He's that rare guide who is both knowledgeable and portable.

We're staying in a town called Ketchum in a beautiful, tastefully decorated home in which the beds have been heavily fortified against human occupancy by a large barrier of decorative pillows.

We can only hope that some day medical science will discover a cure for whatever causes Barrier of Decorative Pillows Syndrome (BDPS), which seems to mainly afflict women. Until that day, if you plan to sleep in one of these beds, each night you will need to remove all the decorative pillows and find somewhere to put them, and then each morning, if you, like me, are married to my wife, Michelle, who is a woman, you will need to make the bed and carefully reconstruct the pillow barrier EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS.

Ketchum is a friendly and polite town. If you start to cross a street, every car within a radius of roughly three miles immediately stops and waits until you’re safely on the other side, in stark contrast to the motorists of Miami, who will speed up and pursue you into buildings. My lone unsettling experience as a pedestrian in Ketchum came several years ago, when, as I reached an intersection, I encountered this sign:

I had NO idea what this sign meant, but I proceeded with caution, and the cars stopped for me as usual. This year I noticed that the sign is gone, which could mean that the Pedestrian Scramble has been re-commissioned. I’m trying not to worry about it.

Our visit to Idaho this year coincided with the annual Sun Valley Writers Conference, which draws some pretty great writers. We had drinks one evening with several of them, including (I am not making this up) Salman Rushdie, shown here giving me some literary tips as one professional to another.

Also on hand for the conference was my old Florida pal Carl Hiaasen. We went on a hike and found ourselves in a scenic setting that inspired us to recreate the Julie Andrews mountaintop scene from "The Sound of Music," the movie that is so beloved by exactly the same demographic that feels the need to cover beds with decorative-pillow barriers.

Carl and I also did a talk at the writers conference. Mainly I interviewed him about his new novel, Fever Beach, but we also talked about the wacky state we live in and all the wacky goings-on that go on there. We ended our talk by performing a song that we co-wrote about one of these wacky events, which occurred in 2019 in Punta Gorda. What happened was, a police officer stopped a woman who turned out to be concealing a live alligator in her yoga pants. It was a small alligator, but still.

Obviously Carl and I had to write a song about that. It's a little country-western-style tune titled "Don't Hate Her For The Gator In Her Pants." Here, if I can get it to work on Substack, is a video of me and Carl performing this song at the Sun Valley Writers Conference. I apologize in advance.

In conclusion, Idaho is basically nothing but potato farms, so there is no reason for anybody to visit. And now it’s time for you paying subscribers to express your views.