“I wasn’t lost; I just didn’t know where I was for a couple
of weeks” — Jim Bridger
Westerners are as a rule a transient breed. Fly-over country is
also start-over country. A historically boom-bust regional economy
has always dictated some bouncing around. People primarily move in
search of economic prosperity, that job with a good salary,
benefits — in short, a future. But small western towns tend to be
half populated by provincial multi-generational types; the other
half are the relative newcomers trying to get along or making a
mess of things.
Recently, at a local laundromat, I bumped into an acquaintance
from my days as a security guard at the Buffalo Bill Historical
Center in Cody, Wyoming, a dozen years ago. This man had lately
gone through a divorce and was just days away from packing a U-Haul
and giving up the Cody ghost. After 13 years he was moving back to
Iowa. And he was walking away from a good job. “I just need a
change of scenery,” he said.
I found this encounter interesting because after 14 years
residence myself, Cody and I are also parting company. The one year
sabbatical spent working for a paper in Choteau, Montana, I’ve
covered already (“It’s Hot,” TAS, July 1998). And rather
than bore readers with the reasons for my new move, I refer them to
my recent “Cody
Coda.”
In the piece I speculate as to whether I’ll move to nearby Big
Horn County, Wyoming. But after careful thought I’ve changed my
mind. I’ve decided to move to — God willing — Salmon, Idaho,
which will offer a more reasonable standard of living. More on that
later.
WESTERN TRANSIENCE encompasses the region’s entire 200-year
history. Mountain men, gold rushers, cowboys trailing a herd.
Later, Depression-era public works projects attracted thousands of
desperate people to build roads, bridges, and dams. And later still
came the oil booms.
Maybe it has something to do with the vast landscapes and the
ability one has to see off into far vistas. Easterners can’t see
very far. Low hills and dense hardwood forests block the view. No
spikey peaks line the horizon fifty miles away. Those long western
views have always been a stimulus to dream of flight. To go away
across a wide river or mountain range. Away across the Great
Divide.
Easterners don’t get this. “Back East,” most people think it the
norm to work at the same job for life, and then retire to God’s
waiting room in Florida or somewhere else warm. These are the
“Beach People.” I have eastern relatives and friends in this
category. The un-transient East (and there is nothing more
un-transient than lying on a beach) does not understand the
transient West. These are two distinct cultural and demographic
views inhabiting the same country.
Going back to Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Jack London, transient
Western writers have been the rule rather than exception. Wallace
Stegner probably wouldn’t have achieved any degree of greatness if
he hadn’t roamed the West in his youth. His family had a dozen
addresses in Saskatchewan, Washington state, and Montana before
landing in Salt Lake City, where the aspiring author managed to
attend the University of Utah during the Depression years.
While Stegner’s roaming was strictly economically driven due to
the times he lived in, writers have always been after that change
of scenery, new people and experiences to get the juices flowing
again. Though they tend to fall into that aforementioned category
of people who make a mess of things.
I’ve always believed that writers go stale without periodic life
upheavals (good or bad) or uprootings, and lately I believe that
I’ve fallen into this state of literary disrepair. I’ve digested
and regurgitated Cody, Wyoming, many times, and I’m tired of it. I
need a new place for a psychic tuneup, if you will.
SALMON IS A town of 3,300 people in central Idaho near the Montana
border. Some 400 miles west of Cody, it’s situated in the Salmon
River Valley at 4,004 feet of elevation (altitude larger than
multitude) and at the confluence of the Salmon River and the
smaller Lemhi River. The ten thousand feet snowy peaks of the
Bitterroot Mountains line the east side of the valley ten miles
away.
Closer to the west are the Salmon River Mountains, and just
beyond them the border of the “Frank Church — River of No Return”
Wilderness, at 1.3 million acres the largest federally designated
wilderness area in the lower Forty Eight states. The “River of No
Return” refers to the fact that multi-day river rafting parties can
only float downstream from Salmon to take-out points along the
river for up to 200 miles to Riggins, Idaho. They cannot return to
Salmon via the river.
The region was visited in the summer of 1805 by the westering
Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery. There the indispensable
Sacagawea had a reunion with her Shoshone relatives. She had been
born a few miles up the Lemhi near present Tendoy, Idaho. But
modern-day Salmon claims her as its own, and a small museum called
the Sacagawea Interpretive Center is devoted to her and the Lewis
and Clark enterprise.
A generation after the latter, a Rocky Mountain Fur Company
brigade — including mountain man legends Jim Bridger and Thomas
Fitzpatrick — spent the winter of 1832-‘33 camped on the Salmon
hunting game and fighting occasional skirmishes with small parties
of marauding Blackfeet. Later on came the miners, loggers, and
ranchers.
SALMON IS certainly remote. Missoula, Montana (population 75,000)
is 140 miles to the north; Boise, Idaho (population 200,000) is 250
miles to the southwest and over mountain roads. Yet Salmon is a
modern town with good schools, a small hospital, Internet and Cable
TV service, a good public library, microbrews and fancy coffee.
There is a vibrant downtown economy because — at just 3,300
people — it’s too small to attract big box stores such as
Wal-Mart, but that’s good and bad. The river chugs through town,
keeping a dozen local river rafting outfitters busy all summer. And
packtrip outfitters get tourists on horseback to probe the “Frank
Church” on weeklong jaunts. I plan on quite a bit of trailhiking
there myself.
I also plan — to paraphrase Voltaire — to “cultivate the
garden” of my “working retirement.” Writing, of course, and doing
God-knows-what-else to make a living. After 30 years of wandering
around the American West whenever I could, Salmon may be the last
stop on the trip, so to speak.
So I bid my Cody friends adieu, with invitations to visit and
promises to return yearly over the mountains myself. Small future
interregnums from my last hurrah on the River of No Return.
