On All Sides Nowhere (Bakeless Prize) - Softcover

William Gruber is a professor of English at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, but spends his summers in Alder Creek, Idaho.

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On All Sides Nowhere

Idaho first registered on my consciousness at the movies. In the
summer of 1960 I was sixteen, and in the middle of August there was
no place in suburban Pennsylvania to find air conditioning except in
supermarkets or theaters. I could not spend summer days amid the
cabbages and canned goods, and so to escape the heat I went with my
friends as often as I could to the movies; one of the movies I sought
out was an elegy for the waning days of modern civilization, On the
Beach.
To the filmgoing public in 1960, keenly aware that despite
all the best intentions the cold war could suddenly turn hot, the
movie was perfectly credible. It was set only a few years into the
future; a calendar on the wall read, ominously, "1964." Nuclear war
of undisclosed origins had killed everyone in the Northern
Hemisphere, and now, as a lethal cloud of radiation spread slowly
over the planet, one of the last surviving groups of humans clustered
in Melbourne, Australia, to await the end. It was an intoxicating,
almost carnivalesque, experience. Gregory Peck played the romantic
lead opposite Ava Gardner, and at one point in the film, Peck, the
taciturn commander of a nuclear submarine, tells Ava Gardner about
his origins. In answer to her question about his childhood home, he
replies with a single word that at the time seemed more homiletic
than informative: "Idaho."
Whose decision was it for Peck to claim Idaho for his
birthplace? Of all the possible states the scriptwriter could have
chosen, why that one? And it was a choice: for the record, Peck was
born in La Jolla, California, and his character in Nevil Shute"s
novel from which the movie was adapted comes from Westport,
Connecticut. Peck"s "Idaho" drops like a stone into a well of unknown
depth; it falls without trace, without echo. It is a piece,
apparently, of purely gratuitous information.
Why Idaho? The name resonates oddly with Melbourne and San
Francisco, the environments of On the Beach. Those places set the
mood of the film. To Americans in 1960, Melbourne was alien, exotic,
and San Francisco brought to mind the glitz and romance of
California. Set in that context, and set against the despairing
hedonism of humans who number their remaining days according to the
drifting global winds, "Idaho" seems dissonant. Its sound is stark,
but as Peck speaks it, it sounds also moral and attractive. It seems
to express Peck"s loneliness, his longing for the simplicity of
childhood and for the innocence of a world before the Bomb. None of
the familiar mythic names of the American West, not Texas or Oregon
or Colorado, would have the same aura of pure expressivity. My guess
is that the name "Idaho" was chosen for its semantic emptiness. The
name made sense because to most people "Idaho" meant nothing, and,
meaning nothing, it could stand in for the infinite pathos of a world
that would shortly cease to exist. Idaho was then, and in some ways
still is, a geographic What You Will, and as a result the
name "Idaho" becomes a kind of cultural Rorschach test for whoever
happens to reflect on it.

A road map of Idaho, if you focus on the narrow strip of land that
sits atop the main bulge of the state, will show U.S. 95 extending
upward from the town of Lewiston on the Snake River and running due
north until it touches British Columbia. U.S. 95 is the only north–
south road in the state; for most of its five hundred–odd miles, its
major function is commercial. On it, apart from a few weeks in summer
at the height of the vacation season, wheat and wood chips move south
to the granaries in Moscow or the pulp mills in Lewiston, logs by the
tens of thousands head north to the lake towns of Coeur d"Alene, Post
Falls, and Sandpoint. On that map, halfway between Moscow and Coeur
d"Alene, several miles above a couple of minuscule settlements
designated, echoically, Desmet and Tensed, a thin blue line splits
off from U.S. 95 and runs due east for twenty miles until it dead-
ends in Idaho 5 coming north from St. Maries.
Nothing much shows on that road big enough to be named; it
starts from nowhere, goes to noplace. Travelers on it turn their
backs on the rolling grainlands of eastern Washington and head toward
a low wall of mountains, smooth, rounded, thick with timber. The
change in topography is instantaneous. In less than two miles they"re
in the foothills of the Bitterroots, the westernmost range of the
Rocky Mountains, scarcely seventy-five miles from the Montana border.
Once over the first row of hills, the road descends again and presses
deeper into those foothills for fifteen miles or so, following
alongside the Benewah Creek and through the Benewah Valley.
Houses and landmarks on that road are few. It"s a gravel
road, in theory at least, but for much of its length it"s better
described as a dirt road backed up with whatever rocks nature or the
Benewah County road crew found time to strew there. "I lived here
better than twenty years," the owner of Benewah Motors, Wally
Krassalt, once told me as we made our way from town out toward my
place to diagnose my ailing Land Rover, "and I never once saw the
Benewah Road in good shape."
Much of the time the road follows alongside the Benewah
Creek, running slightly above the creek through draws filled with
alder and aspen or traversing occasional flatlands and pockets of
deep forest. You drive along the road with no real sense of progress.
It"s hard to mark the miles: there are no towns to encounter, no
height toward which to aspire, just a succession of curves and
glimpses of fields and pockets of forest so similar that they are
valueless as landmarks. If you pursue the Benewah Road almost to its
terminus at State 5, you come upon a Dumpster, angle-parked on a
turnout on the downhill side of the road, positioned so that as you
discard your trash you can look out and down at a postcard view of
the southernmost end of a chain of glacial lakes that stretch from
St. Maries north almost to Canada. On most days the Dumpster
overflows with abandoned household goods, broken bedsteads and
electrical components, scraps of carpet, Sheetrock, and lumber,
random tools or parts of tools, bald and shredded tires, and pieces
of cars. At one time some local wag took a can of bright orange paint
and sprayed "Benewah Shop-n-Save" on the side of the Dumpster. Like
all good humor, it had one foot in reality; my neighbors and I
checked that Dumpster regularly, like a lottery ticket.
Long before you encounter the Dumpster, though, if you are
headed east from U.S. 95, you pass a spot marked on your map
as "Benewah." Maps denote "Benewah" with a small blue circle, as if
to promise travelers a settlement of some kind or other situated
about midway along the road, but the maps promise more than ever
existed. Even in the heyday of north Idaho logging and homesteading,
there never was a town named Benewah. The place is recognizable as a
civic location only because of two buildings, an abandoned one-room
school, painted, the time I first saw it, bright pink, and a
swaybacked frame structure with a faded sign, "Benewah General
Store," and because of a smaller dirt road that dead-ends at the
Benewah Road just east of the schoolhouse. Less than a hundred yards
along that lesser road a sign cautions you that there should be "No
Heavy Hauling When Surface Is Soft." In one instant, if you read it
attentively, that sign tells you much about the local climate and
economy as well as the politics and favorite pastimes of the people
who live there. The sign, like every other sign the county erected
along that road, is riddled with small holes; it"s an instance either
of vandalism or of "bullet art," depending on your point of view. As
you pass by the sign, the road begins to climb out of the valley and
heads into the timber. Now you"re on the road to Alder Creek.

We bought forty acres of land, about the smallest amount of land
available then by way of rural subdivision. Our forty acres were a
quarter part of the 160 acres that had once belonged to a family
named Deja. In the early decades of the twentieth century the place
was the headquarters for a local logging crew, and then, the timber
gone and the land valueless to the company that owned it, the land
passed as a second-generation homestead to Deja. Our place contained
Deja"s house, a log cabin about twenty by thirty feet with green
cardboard interior walls and two antiquated but functioning wood
stoves, a ruinous and older cabin that had been built in 1915 as a
bunkhouse for a crew of loggers, and a lovely and graceful barn with
the top half of its roof missing. Around the house were two, maybe
three acres of meadow and pasture dotted with huge stumps left from
the first time that particular piece of land had ever lost trees to
human hands. Most of them were burned black, evidence of someone"s
vain attempt to turn cut-over timberland into pasture. The rest of
our place, officially 37.5 acres according to the tax records, was
woodland.
Forty acres is a big place to someone used to measuring his
horizons in terms of city blocks, although I soon understood that a
square of land one-quarter mile on a side was much too insignificant
to register against the immensity of the American West. Translated
into its legal description, our forty acres seemed downright puny: we
owned merely the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of
Section 32, Township 45 North, Range 3 West, Boise Meridian. That
legal description reflects the surveyor"s grid that was laid down
over the western half of the country when it was opened for
development. Homesteads were designated as one quarter of a section,
or 160 acres—more than large enough to make a living if the land was
fertile and the growing season long, but in northern Idaho too small
to do much other than to cut the timber and sell out. The real
winners in the development of much of the American West were not the
homesteaders but the railroads, which, in exchange for their efforts
and expenses at laying track, were granted alternating sections of
land along their rights of way. A mile of track, 640 acres of land:
it made for estates the size of which would have put a dukedom to
shame, and it made the railroads rich. Even in the 1970s, when the
railroads nationally were losing money by carloads, the Burlington
Northern compensated for its losses by selling timber from its vast
holdings.
Before Deja owned it, our place had been the site of a
logging camp. The original bunkhouse was situated by the road, and we
found rusty sections of rail and rail spikes in the grass by the
barn, the remnants of a small logging railroad that had been built
down the draw of our creek to where it debouched into a bigger stream
that fed the main fork of Alder Creek. To the north across the road
lay two of the three remaining forties from the Deja place, owned
then by absentees, and about a mile to the east was the Brede ranch
house, unoccupied except during the summer grazing season and fall
roundup. Beyond us to the south was a large, lightly timbered meadow,
almost a savannah, and beyond that lay a mile or more of dense forest
that ended at the Alder Creek Loop Road. Our closest neighbors lived
along that road: Ed and Jean Strobel, Jim Yearout, Bud and Bertha
Yearout, and "Cotton" and Peggy Stanridge. With the exception of the
Strobels, they had all lived in Alder Creek for decades.
The first days on our farm were full of emptiness; I had
never known such quiet, and with the stillness came many unexpected
discoveries. Sitting high atop the barn roof one afternoon I heard
for the first time the rush of air over a crow"s wings as it flew by
overhead. Mornings in the cold, still air you could sometimes pick up
traces of conversation spoken nearly half a mile away at the Brede
ranch, and later in the winter I often stood on the porch simply to
listen to the falling snow. It fell with a hiss, the lightness of
which buoyed the spirits like a sleeping child"s breath.
Our place hardly resembled Laura Ingalls Wilder"s "little
house in the big woods." On three sides of our land lay the open
rangeland of the Brede ranch, and on the remaining northern side
meandered the county road. So we could not think of ourselves as
living on the edge of a forest, much less a wilderness. But still it
gave us pleasure to contemplate owning a woods big enough to get lost
in for a short time, if only you remembered not to walk too long in a
straight line, and big enough too to support its own wildlife
population. We had our own resident deer, coyotes, grouse, and
beavers. In the meadows wildflowers grew in great profusion:
dandelions, lupine, and wild roses in May; ox-eye daisies, Indian
paintbrush, and mustard in summer; and Canada thistles in late
August, on those days when you felt the first chill of fall in the
morning air.
And we had mushrooms. One of our entertainments in April and
early May was to hunt wild mushrooms, mainly morels. One day, not
long after we were living in our cabin, Nancy came across several
women with baskets tramping through the woods. They were members of
the Spokane Mushroom Club, they said, and they had hunted morels on
this land for years. Despite her assurances that they were still
welcome to hunt our land, we never saw them again. But their visit
was the inspiration for our own interest in hunting mushrooms, and
each year during the early spring there was nothing more important to
us than gathering morels.
Part of the reason we hunted mushrooms was economic; we were
always looking for ways to stretch our budget. But the economic value
of twenty pounds of morel mushrooms—a good annual harvest—was
insignificant in relation to the social value of the hunt. Hunting
mushrooms and talking about hunting mushrooms were communal
enterprises for us and for our neighbors, almost a cult; the
sociability of the activity increased its satisfaction. Nancy became
the expert, and she recruited our daughter Elaine as soon as she
could walk; together they endured cold, rain, snow, and gloom as they
made the rounds of their favorite, often secret glades.
Some of the appeal of foraging in the woods was the
experience, new for us, of being in tune with the natural world.
Hunting mushrooms, you focused on the smallest of environmental
details, the texture and color of scales on a fallen cone (these
closely resembled young morels) or the contours of the forest duff
(small mushrooms, especially young boletes, often lay partly hidden
under a carpet of needles). And some of the attraction was distinctly
sensual. Sure, the morel vaguely resembles a phallus, but this erotic
shape wasn"t really part of their emotional and intellectual appeal.
Mushrooms have always been symbols of potent unconscious forces,
forces as potentially dangerous as they are liberating, and so one of
their charms comes from the knowledge that unlike, say, corn or
asparagus, wild mushrooms are not entirely under human control. At
times, hunting mushrooms be-came a mystical experience; as the author
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