Nota bene: I planned this post and uploaded these photos before the big snowstorm hit the southern & eastern United States. Here in the West, we have had an unseasonably mild and un-snowy winter. So these are not disaster pictures, just the wonders of Nature. Enjoy!
It began as a beautiful field,
then became a dusty lot, then
a rapidly rising skeleton to
which insects trundled, their
headlights glowing in the dusk. Now it’s a shiny dull something, a
warehouse or machine shed.
You’d think it would block the horizon, but no.
The horizon is tougher than that, and springs back into place.
You could build a hundred of these warehouse things and not fill up the big sky.
So don’t worry.
Shown against the background chaos of my art room, for scale.
American Falls, Idaho, is the ultimate American Small Town.
For those who are not American–by which I mean the United States–“small town” doesn’t have quite the same connotations as “village.” A “village” sounds older, like it might have been there for a thousand years, whereas a small town, because it’s in America, is no more than 300 and often only 100 years old. “Village” also sounds more homogenous (is everyone related?), and more rural. A village might have feuds and unspoken rules in it that go back a millennium. A small town, while it is getting a start on these things, is basically a recent, frontier development. Though there are founding families, there’s also a lot more movement. City folk come in, start businesses, or get jobs as teachers. Newcomers arrive from other small towns. Children grow up and leave. Americans are very mobile, and the composition and atmosphere of a small town reflects that. There isn’t as rigid a class system as in most other places. And, though American Falls, for example, is the county seat, there’s also a lot less bureaucracy and fewer government jobs than in a town of comparable size in Asia.
On the other hand, a “small town” is definitely not the same as “hood” (short for neighborhood), which is a village-like section of a large city. Small towns are typically located in farmland.
Anyway. American Falls has the following: a river. A hydroelectric dam. A railroad to take farm produce away to be sold. A lot with silos, trucks, and piles of produce near where this railroad passes through town. Lots of churches. Post office, barber shop, mom & pop shops on Main Street (tree-lined), one of which is of course a bar. A hometown football team. Gracious parks, a golf course, and a nearby cattle lot that you can smell most days. Pizza, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants, because this is America after all. It also has a small hospital, though like most people I prefer to take emergencies to the city hospital 25 minutes down the road. Oh, and a community theater!
You can walk around American Falls during the day without fear. Law and order is maintained. The town is hilly enough that, on these walks, you can catch glimpses of all these small-town features and feel as if you just stepped into a slightly more modern, drastically less New England Norman Rockwell painting. Rising above the town, on the southwest side, is the Big State Highway, and, beyond that, the rolling foothills.
I felt I had to burst into this paean to American Falls in order to set the scene for the main point of this post, which is that a delightfully hippie shop has come to our small town.
This is the interior of The Trove, which opened in American Falls in May.
Here we are looking towards the back of the shop. Notice that it features jewelry, leather goods, and paintings involving UFOs. And that the owners are fond of 78 records.
I first heard about The Trove from a person I met at the town festival this summer. This person, who was buying one of my son’s paintings, suggested that The Trove might be happy to carry our work, since its stated mission is to showcase local artists. Although we don’t live actually in American Falls, we figured we might be local enough to count. We headed straight from the town festival to The Trove, with the trunk of our car still full of paintings. Long story short, the owners of The Trove were amenable to this idea, and that’s why some of the paintings pictured above are by my son Andrew.
The mountain and the storm are my paintings, hung under the owner’s paintings of space and a (manatee?), over some quilts, and beside dish towels.
The Trove was even happy to carry a copy of my trilogy! So, if you ever find yourself in southeast Idaho, and want a touristy, artsy shop with lots of cool stuff, know that American Falls has one.
I photographed this stuff growing, as you see, in/near a stream near the Hiawatha Bike Trail in northern Idaho. N.b.: the taller, thicker plants in the immediate foreground are not the same ones I am talking about. I am focused on the feathery, jointed ones near the stream.
Using my Central Rocky Mountain Wildflowers guidebook and the Internet, here is a list of possible identifications I considered:
Then I broke down and asked Google to examine the photo, which means, like it or not, I was enlisting the help of AI. Here were Google’s two suggestions:
Bassia scoparia is our best candidate, and here’s why. It can be found in “riparian areas,” according to the article that I linked. “It naturalizes and self-seed easily.” “This plant is a noxious weed in several states.”
Edit: Beth has suggested it may be “horsetail,” Equisetum arvense. I looked it up, and Horsetail is the most likely candidate yet! According to Wikipedia,
Equisetum arvense, the field horsetail or common horsetail, is an herbaceous perennial plant in the Equisetidae (horsetails) sub-class, native throughout the arctic and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. … Many species of horsetail have been described and subsequently synonymized with E. arvense. One of these is E. calderi, a small form described from Arctic North America.
Northern Idaho isn’t exactly Arctic, but it’s gettin’ close.
Oh. It’s Lupine again.
When I went to see Sage Wall, we stayed in Butte, Montana (pronounced byoot or biut), which is a relatively short drive from my house by the standards of the American West. Butte is a mining town, once known as “The Richest Hill in the World,” although generally, the riches were being spread thin, not going to the people who actually lived there. The riches are copper, silver, and, I believe, opals. If you have more time than we had, Butte has many things like rock shops and a mining museum. You can see little mining towers dotted all over the landscape.
A view of Butte, looking down from the hill above the town.
This plaque talks about women in Butte when it was a boom mining town. Sadly, Old West boom towns are notorious for having a lot of brothels, and Butte was no exception.
Over the town looms the hill itself, and in this hill is a huge, sandy-colored strip mine known as the “Berkeley Pit.” My husband, being the explorer that he is, wanted to visit the Pit. We got there just after the viewing platform closed, so instead, we drove up into the hills above and behind the Pit so as to get a glimpse into its depths.
And lo and behold … on a lookout point that overlooks one section of the Pit, we found this monument to fallen miners.
The monument is a large, paved area with the U.S. and Montana flags in the middle, surrounded by a wall on which informational plaques are mounted. I’m going to let my photos of the plaques do most of the work in telling you this story.
The flags you see in the background represent the nationalities of the miners who lost their lives in the disaster.
This prominent central plaque gives some basic information about the Granite Mountain Fire in June of 1917. The fire did not take place in the Berkely Pit, but in an underground mine. A cable, which was covered in a paperlike covering, broke and fell down a shaft. A group of miners went down to inspect the damage, and the paper covering on the cable was accidentally caught on fire by one of their headlamps.
This plaque, filled with names of men lost in the fire, is one of several.
The fire quickly filled the mine. Groups of miners, trapped in tunnels, built barricades (“bulkheads”) to protect them from the fire while they awaited rescue. Sealed off like this, their main danger became the limited air supply, plus fear and despair as their food and water ran low and their lamps began to go out.
Some of these men wrote letters to their loved ones. Here is one.
The town of Butte essentially stood vigil for several days. Firemen worked around the clock to put out the fire and rescue miners. Restaurants stayed open and gave meals to the rescue workers. Grocery stores provided for the families of missing miners. People went into churches to pray for their loved ones.
The plaque below describes Butte as “the strongest union town on earth.” My feelings on unions are mixed to say the least, but I can certainly understand the need for them in the early days of mining.
Out of Babel Books 