The Brick's 100-year-old bar includes a running-water spintoon. Photo © Greg Sta

There are criss-crossed iron bars caging a cord of firewood in the basement of an 1889 bar in the eastern Cascades of Washington state. This single jail cell, said the bartender, was once the establishment’s drunk tank.

At the social and cultural heart of any old West town are its watering holes, and The Brick is Roslyn, Washington’s. There’s an antique  wood stove and wood floors, original beer taps and cash register on display, and a bull elk mount with Christmas lights strung in its rack. Built of 45,000 bricks fired at local kilns, The Brick is also well-named. From its stone foundation and basement portal into underground tunnels to its original basement jail cell, The Brick oozes the mysteries of frontier history.

The bartender says The Brick is the oldest continuously operating saloon in Washington State. Built by one-time Mayor Peter Giovanini, the establishment’s Washington state liquor license is displayed near the side of its hand-carved antique back bar: “Business ID # 1,” it reads. Similarly, the bar’s address is 1 Pennsylvania Ave.

Established in 1886 by the Northern Pacific Coal Co. (a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railway) Roslyn is a picturesque town built of an eclectic history and quirky modern-day flair. A historic coal mining and timber town, its mines closed in the 1960s with as much as 80 percent of the lode still tucked within the eastern Cascades. Timber companies have sold significant land holdings to real estate developers, but the market has thus far kept their golf courses and retirement homes at bay.

About 1,000 people call Roslyn home, and at the center of it all is the town’s unusual historically-flared bar. The Brick’s hand-carved back bar, for example, is dark-stained and beautiful–and more than 100 years old. It was shipped from England around Cape Horn and purchased in Portalnd, Oregon.

But the beauty in the bar is not in its craftsmanship but its function. Near the base of the bar on the patron’s side is a knee-high rail. In the days before barstools, this was a place for parched patrons to rest weary legs. And below the foot rest is a long metal trough where water flows from left to right before dropping into a small drain. This could be a location for cleaning dirty forks and wetting napkins, but its design is much more utilitarian. It’s a spittoon where juices from chaw-filled cheeks are spat and where, perhaps, more than one bladder has been drained.

After drinking a couple local beers from the Roslyn Brewing Co. and downing an overflowing plate of chili cheese fries, the bartender asks if we’d like a tour of the basement. He says that, in addition to the historic drunk tank, there’s a tunnel that was used during prohibition for town folk to get into the bar from a bakery about a block away—or so local lore says.

We descend steep wooden steps and discover two more jail cells have been added to The Brick’s original drunk tank. In contemporary days these additional cells were added as props for filming the 1979 Dick Van Dyke film, “The Runner Stumbles.” More recently, Roslyn rose to acclaim when its picturesque conifer-covered ridges and old-West street fronts became the setting for the 1990s hit TV series “Northern Exposure.”

A jail cell (far right) in the basement of The Brick in Roslyn, Washington, used to be used as a drunk tank. In 1979 two more wooden cells were added for filming as part of the movie, "The Runner Stumbles." Photo © Greg Stahl.

Roslyn, Washington, through the front windows of The Brick. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Our bartender leads the way past creaky theater seats that “might be” refinished someday and kicks some dust off an old film projector. In the far back of the basement, which is the front foundation of the building, he draws open two sliding iron doors. The tunnels beyond have been walled off, he says, but this was a secret passage into and out of The Brick. The tunnel on the other side of the sliding iron doors is beneath the sidewalk.

Returning a while later to the sunny street in front of 1 Pennsylvania Ave., we look to the hills where the abundant beauty of the Cascades appeal like iced tea on a warm afternoon. Above the stalwart foundation of The Brick, the historic coal mining town is far more than a bar. But in its bar are the lore and lineage of the people that have lived in this place. And they are, no doubt, interesting folk.

______________

• For more on Roslyn, Washington, visit the Wiki.

Yakima, Washington, is Pepsi-riffic. Photos c Greg Stahl.

Yakima, Washington, is a lot of things. It is an east of the Cascades city of about 70,000 people. It is named for the indigenous Yakima Nation. It is a place rich in agriculture, with abundant harvests of apples, peaches, pears, cherries and melons. It is referred to by some, according to a local bartender, as “The Palm Springs of Washington.”

In addition, though, the presence of Pepsi in Yakima is unmistakable. That’s because Yakima is also home to the Noel Corporation, a business that began in the early 1930s when the Yakima Bottling Works was awarded to John Noel, Sr. and Frank Noel. Originally meant to be a brewery, the company obtained the Pepsi franchise for the Yakima area.

Over time the company grew and holds Pepsi franchises across Washington state.It employs more than 360 Yakima-area residents.

For twenty days in August and September 2007 the Castle Rock Fire surged though the Smoky Mountains of central Idaho, and at each turn threatened homes and residents in the resort kingdom of Sun Valley. More than 1,500 firefighters fought the blaze by day and camped in a tent city in a field south of Ketchum by night. Entire valleys and subdivisions were evacuated, and socioeconomic boundaries vanished in a place typically divided by economic striations. Something else took precedent over the community’s inherent castes: kings, queens and serfs joining in a common struggle, the struggle to protect important assets. (Part 2 of 2)

A helicopter chops across a smoke filled sky on its way to douse flames during the Castle Rock Fire. Photo © Greg Stahl.

The year 2000 was my second full cycle of seasons in the Gem State, and it was the fieriest in the state’s contemporary history. All told, 7.4 million acres of public and private land across the United States burned that year, including 1.3 million acres in Idaho.

On August 31 the newspaper’s photographer and I loaded into his chocolate brown Ford pickup and drove three hours north to the city of Salmon, where the nation’s largest wildfire, one of 98 fires burning at the time, raged in the nearby Yellowjacket Mountains. Our guide, a Cherokee Indian  named Walt Sixkiller, met us near the edge of a tent city that filled 15 acres of pasture near the Salmon River. Called Fife Camp, the operation boasted lines of portable toilets, tents, tractor trailers, generators and around the clock lighting. It was a military-like operation and, in fact, a battalion of Marines from camp Pendleton, California, was there helping the nearly 2,000 firefighters combat the flames.

Sixkiller dressed us in green and gold fire retardant clothing and asked that we wear canvass packages on our hips that contained foil-like fire-retardant tarps. If overrun by flames, we were to unfold the tarps, stay put and cover ourselves in the shiny material. Sixkiller called them “Shake and Bakes.”

We drove into the Yellowjacket Mountains where firefighters worked to fell trees in the path of the advancing flames, a process firefighters call building line. Sixkiller showed us homes and cabins that had been wrapped in foil-like material similar to the Shake and Bakes we wore on our hips. As we bumped in Sixkiller’s truck past a patch of smoldering pines, one of the trees ignited. In a matter of seconds all of its 40 feet of height were engulfed in flames. And then it was gone.

“Not in all my (40-year) career, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Sixkiller said. “We’re experiencing some real different fire behavior this year. The fire’s been whipping us.”[1]

And though 2000 and 2007 were dramatic fire years, the fact is that fires are quite natural in the West. The lodgepole pine ecosystem, for example, has evolved with fire, and the pine’s cones require the intense heat of a forest fire to disperse seed. When disturbed by fire, aspen trees emit hormones that accelerate the reproduction process. Certain species actually need fire to renew (or at least recharge) the circle of life.

In 1889 as he rode a train across the West, John Wesley Powell, the explorer who pioneered the Colorado River, observed endless smears of smoke that completely concealed the landscape. Fire ecologists say the 1889 fires burned even more land than the well-publicized Big Blowup of 1910 in northern Idaho.

“In fact, fire ecologists say that far more land burned each year during the 1800s and earlier, than in recent years,” writes High Country News Senior Editor Ray Ring. “In the preindustrial era, from 1500 to 1800, an average of 145 million acres burned every year nationwide—about 10 times more than the nation’s recent annual burns. In the West, (fire ecologist Steve Arno) estimates that 18 to 25 million acres burned each year, as recently as the 1800s.”[2]

In the mid-1900s, however, the federal government launched a war on wildfire, and while Smokey the Bear went to work the acreage burned dropped while the fuel load in the forests mounted.

“There is disagreement about the impacts and severity of the fires in the old days,” Ring writes, “but there is ‘strong consensus,’ Arno says, ‘that smoky skies were more of a fact of life back then—and that we’re heading that direction again.’”

Trees smolder above the Hulen Meadows subdivision near Ketchum. Photo © Greg Stahl.

It was mid-afternoon on Sunday, August 27, when radio traffic on the scanner at the newspaper office in Ketchum indicated that the Castle Rock Fire was being rapidly fanned toward the summit of Bald Mountain, the crown jewel in the Sun Valley kingdom’s crown. With picturesque ski slopes cut from thick stands of Douglas fir and whitebark pine, the Bald Mountain Ski Area is Sun Valley’s postcard-perfect centerpiece, and the oldest destination ski area in the United States.

Founded in 1936 by Union Pacific Railroad Chairman Averell Harriman, Sun Valley Resort boasts a lot of firsts. It was the first place the chairlift was used to convey skiers uphill. It was the first exclusive winter get-away for the wealthy and well-known. It was the first place Ernest Hemingway stuck a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It was the first place I moved eight years before when I left my college town on the west slope of Colorado behind.

It’s evidenced by the mere anecdotes of my time living in Idaho, but every August, the state’s vivid blue skies are concealed by haze, sometimes blown from far-off conflagrations in California, Oregon or Washington but often within an easy afternoon drive.

That day at the newspaper I worked to contact local public officials who were working most closely with fire commanders, but information was sparce. When I reached County Commissioner Tom Bowman on his cell phone he sounded frantic and said all hell was breaking loose; he had to go. I returned to the scanner as radio traffic indicated flames were sweeping up a west-facing ridge near Bald Mountain’s summit, threatening the multi-million-dollar Seattle Ridge Lodge and lift facilities that serviced that part of the mountain. Firefighters made a successful stand near the lodge.

I worked late that night writing a story detailing the successful defense of Seattle Ridge, but I was tired. In the course of a few days, the newspaper had been transformed with deft efficiency from a two-issues-per-week resort town rag into a daily print edition that also posted twice-per-day internet updates. As assistant editor it was my job to manage a solid share of the production.

At 11 p.m., exhausted from the day’s interviews, writing and editing, I sat at a desk with the scanner in my lap. The day’s final broadcast reported it “will be a fresh start tomorrow.”

And it was.

*        *        *        *

Despite the newspaper’s Pulitzer-nominated coverage of the Castle Rock Fire, it took a New York Times reporter to point out the obvious. When I logged on to my computer on Tuesday, August 29, I opened an e-mail containing a story titled: “When Wildfires Threaten, Wealthy Get Extra Shield.”

Featuring a local resident named Al LaPeter, the story referenced LaPeter’s 7,000 square foot house on the Big Wood River, his Ferrari 430 Spider in the garage and his immaculate Model A Ford.

“Covered. Literally,” the story read.[3]

“Right then and there, Tom Futral, a guy from Montana with a spray gun and a truckload of the magical goop that has quickly become the envy of the second-home set in this pricey part of the parched West, was applying fire retardant to Mr. LaPeter’s shake roof and wood house, courtesy of his insurer, the AIG Private Client Group.”[4]

LaPeter told the Times the insurance company had called him. He wasn’t even aware of the service.

“That may be because this is the first time in memory that a wildfire has so closely threatened the A-list redoubts of Hailey, Ketchum and Sun Valley (there are $3.7 billion in assets to protect, according to the incident commander leading the fire fight), and it is the first time AIG has deployed a crew to Idaho as part of its Wildfire Protection Unit for high-end clients who are willing to pay what the company says is an average of $10,000 annually for homeowner’s insurance.[5]

In the West, water flows uphill toward money. And so too, apparently, does the state-of-the-art fire retardant called Phos-Check that was applied to LaPeter’s home that day.

A plume billows from near the top of Bald Mountain as the Castle Rock Fire makes its final assault on Sun Valley. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Wednesday, August 30, was the day Sun Valley was saved. Fanned by 20 mile per hour winds, the Castle Rock Fire stormed out of Bassett Gulch on Bald Mountain’s western flank and reached its 9,151-foot summit by mid-afternoon. Spot fires flared inside the ski area’s boundaries, and a huge plume of smoke erupted from the mountain’s conical contours. “What we hoped would not happen did happen,” fire information officer David Olson told one of the paper’s reporters.[6]

Sun Valley Resort fired up its state-of-the-art snowmaking system to pump water onto Bald Mountain’s historic ski slopes, and helicopter pilots attacked the flames with fire retardant and buckets of water collected at area ponds.

Further evacuation orders were issued, this time for more than 1,400 homes in an area on Bald Mountain’s northern flank. It seemed only a matter of time until the flames threatened my neighborhood at the mountain’s eastern edge.

That night, I sat on a sagebrush-swept ridge north of Ketchum and watched the fire flare and wither with life-like surges as it accumulated still more timber at the edge of the ski area’s boundary. Though the threat appeared imminent, fire commanders were gaining confidence. If they could hold the blaze at the ski area’s edge, where ski runs served as pre-cut fire breaks, the fire might be stopped.

Watching advancing flames becomes a passtime in Sun Valley during the Castle Rock Fire. Photo © Greg Stahl.

As it works with large wildfires in almost universal fashion, it was Mother Nature who decided to end the chaos. A light rain fell over Ketchum early on Tuesday, September 4, and by sometime around 6 a.m., firefighters put the final touches on the last stretch of fire line. The Castle Rock Fire, which stood at 48,520 acres, was fully contained.

My brother returned to his home, and I returned my guitar, photo album, yellowing plastic box of keepsakes and legal documents to the west Ketchum loft. Hundreds of others who were forced from their homes returned, some to discover intact structures surrounded by proudly standing trunks of charcoal.

It’s not that the work by firefighters was in vein; the exact opposite was true. Were it not for the thousands of firefighters who descended on Sun Valley in the summer of 2007, homes, livelihoods and perhaps lives would have been lost. But, as it works with life, the burn wasn’t completely controlled until Mother Nature decided it was time.

And Tuesday, September 4, was time.

(Click here to read Part 1 and the story of sifting through precious belongings to see what to save.)

© Greg Stahl

1. Idaho Mountain Express. September 6, 2000. “Clear Creek Fire faces.” Greg Stahl.
2. High Country News. May 26, 2003. “History is full of big fires.” Ray Ring.
3. The New York Times. Aug. 28, 2007. “The Wealthy Get an Extra Shield for Wildfires.” William Yardley.
4. Id.
5. Id.
6. Idaho Mountain Express. Aug. 29, 2007. “Fire Rages on flanks of Baldy.” Jason Kauffman.

For twenty days in August and September 2007 the Castle Rock Fire surged though the Smoky Mountains of central Idaho, and at each turn threatened homes and residents in the resort kingdom of Sun Valley. More than 1,500 firefighters fought the blaze by day and camped in a tent city in a field south of Ketchum by night. Entire valleys and subdivisions were evacuated, and socioeconomic boundaries vanished in a place typically divided by economic striations. Something else took precedent over the community’s inherent castes: kings, queens and serfs joining in a common struggle, the struggle to protect important assets. (Part 1 of 2)

The Castle Rock Fire burns into Adam's Gulch near Ketchum, Idaho. Photo © Greg Stahl.

A helicopter works to douse flames on the flanks of Griffin Butte. Photo © Greg Stahl.

The sky was black in every direction, the mountains to the west belching a suffocating cloud into the clear summer sky over Ketchum, Idaho.

Home for lunch from my job at the local newspaper, I sat in a metal chair on the worn wooden deck at a cabin where I rented the loft. While I sat on the porch dipping a grilled cheese sandwich in a bowl of tomato soup, a man weaved into the yard beneath the willow limbs that dangled near the deck. He offered an awkward hello.

“I’m here to close the air ducts beneath the houses in this neighborhood,” he said. “It’s supposed to help keep ‘em from burning if the fire comes through.”

Okay, I nodded and took a spoonful of tomato soup as he went around back of the cabin. My soup bowl eventually scraped clean, I went inside the cabin to grab a guitar for a few minutes of strumming before returning to the newspaper, where we were working overtime to keep track of the advancing flames. In mid-strum, a lady wearing a blue uniform interrupted.

“I’m with the Castle Rock Fire,” she said. “I’m here to let you know you need to be prepared to evacuate.”

Okay, I nodded and began picking through an arpeggio.

“What’s the latest on the weather?” I asked, the notes of A-minor slipping into the afternoon.

“There’s a front moving through,” she said. “We’re expecting a lot of wind, and those fires aren’t very far over the other side of the mountain. The notice is from the mayor.”

Okay, I nodded and dropped into a well of contemplation, my fingers stilled on the fret board.

“I’m going camping tonight,” I said, “breathe some clean air for a change. You think I should take my guitar?”

“If I were you I’d take my guitar, my birth certificate and a photograph of my daughter,” she said.

“I don’t have a daughter,” I returned, but she remained stern and businesslike.

“I think you get the picture,” she said.

As she walked away to knock on more doors and warn Ketchum’s nervous west-side residents of the potential for evacuation, my glib attitude slipped. I’d joked about the potential for evacuation a few days earlier, but I was suddenly faced with the potential reality of being forced from my home while an out-of-control forest fire bore down.

What of my meager possessions would I actually take to the mountains that night knowing I might not be able to return, knowing that whatever I left behind might be incinerated?

The answer was surprisingly easy: not much.

It’s all just stuff.

The Castle Rock Fire storms into Adam's Gulch. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Helicopters chopped the smoky air over the highway, flying buckets of water from area ponds to fire lines before returning to refill them and repeat the procedure. The sky glowed orange with the sun’s diffused rays, and a suffocating fog limited sight to about a quarter mile. I flipped my truck’s headlights alive as loads of fire fighters in big green trucks worked up and down the road, headed for camp or another flare-up where new line or reinforcements might be needed.

North of town I passed an empty golf course where men and women in collared shirts would ordinarily be puttering through their afternoons. Then the handsome north-of-Ketchum homes, huge houses set on 10-acre lots, materialized from the haze. Among the residents of this exclusive strip are rock and roll icon Steve Miller, Oscar winner Tom Hanks and U.S. Senator John Kerry. I wondered as I drove how much of the swift and powerful firefighting effort had to do with Sun Valley’s affluence.

A little farther north, after passing into the 756,000-acre Sawtooth National Recreation Area, the smoke began to thin, and by the time I crossed Galena Summit, a mountain pass that divides watersheds, the sky was a deep, penetrating blue. I stopped at the pass and climbed out of the truck, inhaling deeply my first clean air in a week.

*        *        *        *

When I returned to the newspaper office, my mind invigorated by a night of fresh air, the fire was continuing to advance to the north, south and east, and word was spreading of visiting dignitaries. United States Senators Mike Crapo and Larry Craig were planning stop-overs, as were Second District Congressman Mike Simposn and Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter. I placed a few phone calls and discovered that, after touring the Castle Rock Fire from the air, Otter’s Blackhawk helicopter would touch down mid-morning at the airport in Hailey, about 10 miles south of Ketchum and five miles south of the nearest fire line.

I climbed into my truck and sped to a private hangar where the governor was scheduled to land. After a half hour spent drinking Styrofoam-cup coffee and sitting in stiff-backed lobby furniture the helicopter settled on the tarmac outside a wall of windows and a pair of glass-paned doors. Otter’s six-foot frame emerged and followed a contingent of local politicians, Forest Service rangers and fire commanders, escorted by the Air National Guard, into the lobby at Sun Valley Aviation. He joined me and the newspaper’s photographer at a small table in a corner of the lobby, where there were views of smoke pouring out of the mountains to the north.

“I don’t think we really appreciated the urgency of what you’ve got up here until about 2:30 yesterday (Tuesday, August 23) afternoon,” Otter said.[1] He relayed that, following discussions with Idaho’s four Congressmen via telephone, the state’s top politicians had successfully urged that the fire be upgraded to the number one priority wildfire in the nation. That would make it possible to get more firefighters on the ground, more planes and helicopters in the air and for financiers to begin charting creative ways to finance the expensive effort.

“We had the realization that there was some extreme danger, not only to property, but to life up here,” Otter said. “This became the number one fire yesterday, not only in the state but in the nation. It’s the number one priority in the nation.”[2]

The Governor touted disaster declarations he’d issued to Blaine County and the state of Idaho earlier in the week. They’d enable firefighting efforts by local fire departments to continue without concern for budgetary constraints. The state, he said, had already spent $19 million combating wildfires that summer. It was a price tag sure to mount.

“It will give a comfort zone for the local folks who would have had to pay them back,” he said. “It would have broke the bank.”[3]

*       *        *        *

Ben Stahl surveys his room as the Castle Rock Fire bears down. Photo © Greg Stahl.

My brother lived in a trailer near the south side of town that summer, and his evacuation on Saturday, August 26, was more than stand-by notice. He called to ask for help packing belongings in his two pickup trucks, and when I arrived I found an aluminum ladder leading to the trailer’s roof.

I climbed the rungs and hoisted myself up to find him positioning a sprinkler among the two-by-four studs of a still unfinished construction project.

“Think it would make a difference?” I asked.

“Can’t hurt to try,” he said. “There’s ash blowing in from the fire. The sprinkler might keep the studs from catching if an ember lands here.”

We looked to the southwest where the fire had made significant gains the night before. A billow rose from the hills only a mile or two away.

“The good news is, we’re near the hospital,” he said. “They’ll work hard to defend the hospital.”

“I imagine they will,” I said.

“You know, my neighbor says if you want it to rain you should burn five earthworms,” he said. “We were out in the garden this morning looking for worms.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “Did you burn any?”

“All five,” he said.

I clapped him on the back, and we climbed down the ladder and rotated the faucet connected to his garden hose. The spray from his sprinkler fell beyond the edges of the roof and spattered blades of grass in the yard.

When we arrived in the trailer his wife was busily sorting through belongings. My brother said they were already supposed to have left, a police officer having stopped by to usher them out. He’d be back soon, and when he returned they were going to have to be gone.

“All the neighbors already left,” he said.

“How does it feel to be evacuated from your home?” I asked.

He sat on a leather couch, his fingers on his chin, while he considered how to answer the question. When he did, his voice was elevated.

“No insurance, no home, no place to go,” he said. “What do you do?”

“Honey, why so negative?” his wife contributed.

“We’ve got no home. We’ve got nowhere to go.” His voice was more emotional still. “That’s what it’s like to be evacuated from your home.”

“It’s only for a couple days,” she said.

We loaded a few more of their things into their trucks, which were overflowing with carpentry tools, clothes, guitars and computers, and then they drove down the road, headed for a friend’s house and wondering if the home they’d been preparing for a baby would be there when they got back. I returned to my truck and drove north toward Ketchum passing a field full of colorful dome tents where more than a thousand firefighters went to rest each night. I returned to the cabin on the west edge of town and discovered my roommate considering what she might pack when ordered to evacuate.

“Should I take my chest of drawers?” she asked. “The couch? The couch is really expensive.”

“No,” I answered.

“I know,” she said. “Just the important stuff.”

I climbed the wooden stairs to the loft and leafed through some of my own things, wondering about the advice I’d dolled out. I didn’t have renter’s insurance, so I struggled with the exercise for a while. There was time for struggle. But in addition to an extra day’s clothes and some things like a sleeping bag and jug of water that were already in my truck, I set aside five more items: a box containing my birth certificate, passport and other legal documents; a photo album my parents compiled when I graduated high school; a yellowing plastic box containing emotionally-significant keepsakes, a few of my favorite books; and a guitar.

(Click here to read Part 2, including the fight to save Bald Mountain Ski Area)

© Greg Stahl

___________________

1. Idaho Mountain Express. Aug. 23, 2007. “Castle Rock Fire Deemed number one priority nationwide.” Stahl, Greg.
2. Id.
3. Id.

Front Street and the Grove Hotel in downtown Boise. Photo © Greg Stahl.

The sky beyond the 47 Freeway glowed with the soft light of a pollution-induced sunset, and the diffused glow washed a wall covered in carefully selected colors with rusty hues. A man paused to admire his work, then turned and slumped with his back against warm bricks, feet tucked tight, knees drawn to his chest.

A motorcycle rumbled past, its thunder echoing from one side of the street to the other, a canyon where all matter was built in factories and stored in warehouses before being assembled in the man-made canyon country, a wonder built of bricks, asphalt, iron, cement and steel.

His was a job of purpose. When he woke in the morning shade of the Sway Street Bridge, he prepared with the rote of years of honed obsession. There was a collection of pages wrapped in wax paper beneath a rock near the spot he slept. He would thumb through them and latch to a memory, far away like the hush of a slow wind in the blue-green sage on the mesa he used to know. It would be his meditation for a while, and he’d let memoirs course his present moment. The seed of an idea in hand, when the sun had climbed and the silent soldiers had assumed their nine-to-five posts, he would gather his things, pack a worn pack and walk into the canyon country, where the walls towered and wild creatures crawled from sewer pipe crack houses and canvass bag grottoes.

The process was always the same, and it was always different. He would find a brick wall, or a cinder block wall, or a wall made of stucco or dryvit. And he would always start in the shade because the wall always faced west. It was always a smooth, arcing stroke, the sweep of a brush that bridged past and present. The stillness of the storms that shaped his days in the canyons of the mesa would flood, a desert sun’s deluge that poured onto the wall in sweeps of color, line, light and shadow.

He often worked a day through, his skin singing in the sun and his acrylics drying as fast as they were applied, and the walls came to life under his touch. Where there had been only bricks and mortar, windows appeared, portholes into the organic curves of the canyon country framed by the sharp manicured edges of the canyon country.

His knees drawn to his chest, his back against warm bricks, a day’s ritual completed, he paused to wonder if or when things would change. At some point he’d have to return. At some point he’d have to leave these canyons behind. At some point he’d have to face the things he left. Life works like that sometimes. Sometimes fears have to be faced before being buried for good. He could feel his fears calling.

She was among them, of course. He remembered her braided ponytail in his hand, the way she’d crumbled to the earth so easily. He’d used more muscle than he meant, but he knew force hadn’t been necessary at all. There are moments in life you can’t take back, and that had been one of them. He never looked at her again after that, and within a few days he’d left the mesa.

He’d worked his way west, becoming a transient in dusty towns where pointy-toed boots outnumbered sandals or sneakers, but eventually he found his way to the city, where he believed he’d also found his purpose.

They’d learned their crafts together, he with paints and she with pens. There was a place where the piñons used to crowd the canyon rim, and views of the desert’s sandstone striations unfolded like the pages of history below. There was a rock on which she liked to recline in the late-day sun, and while she sat to scribble about the wisdom in the sky and naked truth in the land, he would paint her into the landscape of his canvass. As the sun slipped and the stars unfurled they would make love among the rocks, then lay beneath the open vault of the Milky Way–far away and still right there.

But change is as sure as the setting sun, and a man with shiny black shoes and a striped navy blue tie arrived on the mesa one spring. He said he was from a city to the west and would bring money and jobs to such a barren place. He filed claim to harvest minerals from the desert and brought men and big machines that tore the desert down. At the place where the piñons crowded the canyon rim, and views of the desert’s sandstone striations unfolded like the pages of history below, he marveled at the sight. By fall he’d pounded a sign into the earth: “Piñon Estates: Great Desert Views!” it read.

With this, she had somehow been at peace. Progress comes at a cost, she’d said, and you cannot change things that have already come to pass. The desert is big, and there were other rocks from which to write and paint. If she was the calm of dawn, he was an afternoon gale, and with the animated way he tried to combat her confusing logic he’d somehow grabbed hold of her braid. The groan of machines split the stillness around them, and mortar, bricks and steel took form in the dry desert sun, the sharp manicured edges of the canyon country framed by the organic curves of the canyon country.

The warm bricks against his back were beginning to cool, so he stood and gathered his things, packing them in his pack, and then he stood to give his day’s work a final discriminating pass. His palm swept across the paint, dry in the evening heat, and then he stepped cautiously backward across a concrete sidewalk, past a parking meter, down a curb and onto the asphalt of an empty street.

Before him, where before were the parallel rows and columns of bricks and mortar, was a sweep of colorful sky above the gold and red of a canyon crowded by piñons. Reclining against a rock near the canyon’s edge was a woman with a small pad and pen in her lap, a single long braid draped across her shoulder, the long shadows of late-day light playing a happy staccato in her eyes.

Satisfied, he shouldered his pack and turned for the Sway Street Bridge while far away on a rock in the canyon country to the east beneath the unfurling stars of the Milky Way, these final few words fell onto her page.

© Greg Stahl

Luciana Aboitiz Garatea is a 105-year-old woman whose story is emblematic of a generation of Americans whose paths converged at Ellis Island before influencing the cultural landscape of the Rocky Mountain West.

A Basque woman born in Lekeitio, Bizkaia, on March 3, 1905, Aboitiz Garatea lived in the Basque country until the age of 15. Like thousands of Basques who left the traditions and familiarity of their homeland, Aboitiz Garatea moved to the unfurling American West, where ranching, farming and mining were prying open a once-imposing frontier.

Aboitiz Garatea arrived in Idaho at 8 p.m. on September 6, 1920, and soon after began cleaning floors and ironing clothes at her aunt’s Star Boarding House. The story of her immigration to Idaho is memorialized as a central part of an exhibit called “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Basques.”

On display at Ellis Island from February through April 2010, the exhibit was returned to the Basque Museum & Cultural Center in Boise this summer for the once-every-five-years international Basque festival, Jaialdi, which concludes this week. The exhibit will become the museum’s featured display this September when it replaces an existing display on Basque whaling.

Between 1892 and 1924, an estimated 25 million immigrants passed through the Port of New York at Ellis Island, according to the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. Many were the ancestors of today’s vibrant United States-based Basque community. Many were West-bound Basques.

“We hope that visitors will leave with the knowledge that the Basques are the oldest people on the Iberian Peninsula, that their language is unique in the world and that the Basque Country has maintained its history, but is also a very modern, progressive society,” said Diana Echeverria, a member of the board of directors of the Basque Museum, in an interview for eitb.com.

In her “Hidden in Plain Sight” exhibit video, Abotiz Garatea recalled with bright eyes and tack-sharp memory that she traveled first to Bilboa near the Bay of Biscay, then on to a port, where she waited for three days to complete paperwork before boarding a small ship, with good food, called The Gothland.

Abotiz Garatea spent less than a week traveling safe seas aboard The Gothland and arrived at Ellis Island, where she was surprised by the scale of the American immigration machine. “None of us had ever seen anything like it,” she said in the video. That was the first of 11 days during which they slept on stacked bunk beds in dorms “like chicken coops” and ate rationed food.

“Everybody was mixed together and scared, but they were just like we were. It was mandatory to enter through there (Ellis Island). We never left each others’ side, not ever.”

She said they were fed well and did not encounter other Basques. “We never even saw another Basque person. There were people from every nation,” she said. After 11 days of sleeping in “chicken coops” Aboitiz Garatea was processed and left New York via train for Boise.

“It took four more days,” she said. There was a small sink where they splashed water in their faces “like cats do” to bathe. And, for four days, they didn’t change clothes

“We slept. We slept … Four days. I spent four days like that. It had been one full month since I left to reach Boise. One month. Yea, and me … who had never left home before. It was tough.”

Upon arriving at her aunt’s house in Boise, Aboitiz Garatea remembers a Basque dinner followed the next morning by eggs and chorizos. “I was happy,” she laughed. “Incredibly happy.”

A little more than two years later, according to a printed display, Aboitiz Garatea married Esteban Garatea, and the couple gave birth to four children. Esteban Garatea worked in a sawmill until his untimely death, and Aboitiz Garatea raised her four children in Emmett, Idaho.

It wasn’t until 25 years later that Aboitiz Garatea achieved one of her proudest accomplishments, when she passed her tests for United States citizenship. She later bought the Plaza Hotel in Burns, Oregon, but more recently sold the hotel and returned to Boise.

“Oh, yes, for me it’s been the best,” she said of her immigration from the Basque Country to Idaho. “My aunt and I were the only ones to come from our family. My aunt made it to 100 and two months. Me, I’m 105. From the same family. And we were the only ones to come here from our family. America, America has been so good to me.”

Asked why she thinks she’s lived to a healthy 105, she was quick to answer: “I have a happy heart,” she said. “I am not sad.”

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• While at Ellis Island the National Park Service estimates that “Hidden in Plain Sight” brought the story of Basque culture in the United States to more than 300,000 people. For  information on viewing the exhibit in Boise visit the Basque Museum & Cultural Center.

The Camas Prairie at sunset. Photo © Greg Stahl.

The Camas Prairie of south-central Idaho can easily be described by what it is not.

It is not smog, traffic, tall buildings or bustling people. It is not forests or wilderness. It is not wet or humid. It is not easy.

The Camas Prairie is not early United States history. It isn’t even Lewis and Clark history. It isn’t surfing, stockcar racing or NFL football. Nor is the Camas Prairie asphalt or concrete.

And, yet, the Camas Prairie is defined by all of these things.

For the past several weeks I’ve been kneading the idea of negative space. One of my earliest art teachers used to train her students to think about this concept. By drawing the shapes and patterns that were not the desired object, the aspiring artist was able to more accurately capture the item in question. Perspective and foreshortening became integral parts of a drawing by the mere trick of learning how to see differently, by learning how to focus on negative space.

A picture of the Camas Prairie begins to develop by listing things it is not, but there are ways to examine this concept on deeper levels still. Places as much as people have been molded by experiences and events. Perhaps, then, a more complete picture of the Camas Prairie begins to form when its history is invoked.

Before its discovery by Europeans, the Camas Praire was abundant and accessible, and it attracted early hunters and gatherers from throughout the region. A beautiful purple-blue blossom called the Camas lily grows from a bulb that has special significance to the Bannock tribe, which migrated to the prairie each summer to harvest and hunt. Camas and yumpa plants, in particular, were staples in the Indian diet.

Later in the 1800s, encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862, cabins took root along the immigrant trail, and early ranches began using the area’s creeks to water stock and grow hay. That led the way for waves of miners, stockmen and farmers, and in 1878 Chief Buffalo Horn led the Bannock to war against the immigrants.

Still, these are things the Camas Prairie is not.

Mining and lumber cutting drew more people to the region, and the prairie became a primary travel route for prospectors into the Soldier, Smoky, and Pioneer mountains. By the early 1900s, the prairie boasted four sawmills to process timber harvested from the nearby mountains.

By the early 1900s, the prairie’s population reached a pinnacle of 4,900. Of the prairie’s four small towns–Soldier, Corral, Manard and Taft–Soldier was the center of commerce.  There were 27 schoohouses spread around the prairie to facilitate easy access during the prairie’s typically harsh winters.

Still, these are things the Camas Praire is not.

In 1912, the Union Pacific Railroad built a spur into the Camas Prairie to service the budding sheep ranching and lumber cutting industries. The town of Soldier was relocated to be closer to the railroad and was renamed Fairfield, which is now the political and economic hub of Camas County.

By the mid-twentieth century the Camas Prairie’s boom had gone bust. Mining and timber businesses folded; the railroad shut down. With jobs waning the population slipped, and 1,000 hearty men and women remained. Of the prairie’s original cities, only Fairfield was left.

And, still, these are things the Camas Prairie is not.

Places, as people, are comprised of everything they used to be. The Camas Prairie is defined by hunting and gathering, invasion, betrayal, commerce, growth and decay. Yet, it is none of these things.

And so it is with the negative space of our lives. The past is no more real than the thoughts and words used to sustain it, and one cannot dwell there continuously because it doesn’t really exist. But to ignore it is an exercise at failing to fully see.

© Greg Stahl

• Camas County politics, “Developer learns prairie rules,” a news story by the author
• Camas County census data
• Fairfield, Idaho
• Centennial Marsh Wildlife Management Area

Freestyle kayaking at Kelly's Whitewater Park in Cascade, Idaho, could help remake an Old West town. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Waiting to surf. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Cascade, Idaho, has become the newest part of the New West, and the talent in the eddy at the city’s recently unveiled whitewater park on Tuesday, July 14, was evidence of that.

There were four or five kids in shiny Jackson playboats, and a few more over the age of 25 or 30 trying to keep up. I gave quick measure to their abilities in the hole and realized there was no way I would stand out in this group of highly skilled playboaters.

One of the kids had a red, white and blue Jackson boat with shiny letters on the side reading “NEURO.” After watching him take a few surfs in the hole, I tapped the letters with my paddle.

“What’s NEURO?” I asked, my voice elevated to compete with the foaming water nearby.

A drink company, he responded.

“You sponsored?”

“Yep.” He held out his hand. “I’m Jason.”

We shook hands across the current of the eddy. “You from around here, Jason?”

“No,” he said. “From Reno. But I’m thinking about going to college in Boise. There are some amazing rivers around here.”

We talked for a while about school and kayaking, and then Jason from Reno paddled into the whitewash with a few smooth paddle strokes. Another kid waiting his turn looked at me.

“He’s good, isn’t he? That’s Jason Craig, the reigning junior freestyle world champ.”

“That would make sense,” I said as Jason Craig from Reno performed an acrobatic aerial stunt called a loop. “He is good–and a nice guy, too.”

Reigning world freestyle kayaking champion Jason Kraig, 16, throws a loop while surfing at Kelly's Whitewater Park in Cascade, Idaho. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Surf's up at Kelly's. Photo © Greg Stahl.

With its grand opening only three weeks ago, Kelly’s Whitewater Park in Cascad has alreeady logged 8,000 visits by boaters, floaters and curious Idaho residents, and it is clear that the addition of Idaho’s first whitewater play park will become a boon to the community of Cascade and its residents.

An old timber town, Cascade’s biggest employer, the Boise Cascade Mill, closed in 2001. In 2009, after considerable fanfare and marginal success, one of the nation’s newest ski resorts, Tamarack, closed in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown. But Cascade had not yet taken advantage of one of its most obvious assets: the North Fork of the Payette River.

With help from private donors, lots of fundraisers and a few grants, Kelly’s Whitewater Park became a reality at no cost to Cascade or its residents.

“Cascade is a community in transition with new opportunities in recreation and services rather than their past resource extraction based economy,” said Steve Drown, professor and chair of Landscape Architecture and Extension education specialist in Bioregional Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Idaho.

Cascade Mayor Dick Carter reported that the park is already propping the local economy, which boasted 20 percent unemployment following Boise Cascade’s closing. Two tube and raft rental companies have taken root, as have a bed and breakfast and bistro. What’s more, the Payette River system is already nationally renowned for its high-caliber whitewater kayaking and rafting. Known to some as the University of Whitewater for its summer-long season and boating at all skill levels, the Payette system has been highly enhanced with this play-specific addition.

Kelly’s Whitewater Park has five water features ranging from beginner to advanced, and the facility boasts a 2,600-square-foot welcome center, which is perched over the river with huge glass windows with views of the whitewater.

But the park is more than a simple addition to a community searching for its place in the New West.

In the fall of 2008, the University of Idaho’s Building Sustainable Communities Initiative and the College of Art and Architecture joined the project to help create a new vision for Cascade. They developed concepts for community design that involved green infrastructure, community wellness, civic architecture and affordable housing.

Among the ideas whipped up in this cauldron of creativity was a tourism generator, the whitewater park. In March 2009, a $500,000 gift from Mark and Kristina Pickard of Miami, Fla., gave life to the project. Named in honor of Kristina’s late sister, Kelly Brennan, Kelly’s Whitewater Park could generate in excess of $1 million in retail business annually, according to a preliminary economic analysis.

“The energy of the park development and donor involvement catalyzed the community and created a new vision,” said Drown. “It has given the community a new drive to look at comprehensive plan work and entrepreneurial opportunity.”

And, when further stages of construction are complete, the community will boast a superlative 200-acre greenbelt park with additional recreation facilities and reclaimed wetlands where once the detritus of the Boise Cascade Mill’s downed timber and empty facilities were scattered.

“We want our community to be a destination – a place where people intentionally come visit, stay, walk around and enjoy what we have to offer,” said Carter.

Back in the eddy, I quickly discovered I was in the midst of more than one sponsored kayaker. Another was from West Virginia, and several other highly accomplished boaters made the two-hour drive from Boise to spend a weekday afternoon getting wet in Cascade.

A year ago, Cascade was a scenic blur for kayakers driving north or south on state Highway 55. Now it is a destination, a part of an evolving New West, and a model for communities searching for creative ways to build sustainable futures.

© Greg Stahl

The visitor's center at Kelly's Whitewater Park boasts panoramic views, as well as exhibits explaining Idaho's rich Native American history. Photo © Greg Stahl.

Big blue and mountain green near Burgdorf, Idaho. Photo © Greg Stahl.

For three artists with childhood and adolescent roots in Huntingdon, Penn., November will be an opportunity to answer the question: “Where are they now?”

I will join good friend and fellow photographer, Staci Grimes, and friend and visual artist James States to return to our home town to share our worlds as we see them (and as they have evolved) through photography, drawing, painting and clay. In coordination with the  Huntingdon County Arts Council, the tentative date for the exhibit opening reception is Friday, Nov. 26, in the evening. (More details to follow.)