What Grows Out There

It rained on the family picnic.

Not enough to make anybody scoop up the cake pans and the folding chairs and hurry them inside. But just enough to splatter gray dots on the sidewalk and make your jeans cling to your knees.

"That was a pretty hard rain," Dad declared the next morning. He checked the TV news to see how it measured up.

The weatherman reported 7/300ths of a inch.

All that hard rain fell on Caldwell, Idaho, a place one guidebook describes as "a real workingman's drudge." Like most county seats out there, it's big enough that if you wander in without a map, you might get lost, yet small enough that you won't stay lost for long.

It's got a nine-block downtown, with elevators in buildings hardly tall enough to need them. It's got two radio stations and a quiet little college just a block from the rodeo grounds. It's got a hospital, good for run-of-the-mill appendicitis and broken arms, iffy on everything else.

The grass is green in Caldwell, not because water falls abundantly from the sky, nor because it springs up from the ground. The grass is green in Caldwell thanks to horizontal water.

Every Saturday, Dad spun a valve at the corner of the lawn and it gushed out, running freely to us from the canal down the street. It flooded the grass ankle deep. I changed into my swimsuit and stomped through this lake in the grass, raising spindrifts of mud, avoiding the floating earwigs.

Then Dad turned the valve again and it all disappeared until the next Saturday.

And the grass at our house was green enough to keep the lawn man coming every week.

Behind the house, it was different. Back there, where the water didn't flow, the weeds were crackly and tall. In especially dry years, every footfall raised a cloud of dust and grasshoppers.

Not until I left this place did I understand what the scratchy brown weeds in back of the house meant. Not until I left did I know this place skated on the thin blade of a trick against nature.

People smile wistfully when I tell them I'm from Idaho. "You lucky girl, you. Such pretty country out there."

I think they need to cut their intake of glossy hiking journalism. For every acre of piney mountain peak and crystal clear lake, you find five more acres like the scratchy brown weeds.

To the north and the west of Caldwell lie empty hills of short brown grass. When a mailbox or two appears along the highway, you might think a town is coming up. But the mailboxes stay miles apart. You can't even see the farmhouses where the mail goes. I'll bet the vultures circling over one farmer's roadkill never even brush wingtips with the vultures circling his neighbor's.

To the south are hills, faint blue in the distance. I remember a field trip out there in the sixth grade, where nothing lived but lizards. We sat on bleached rock and squinted in the sunlight. There are roads so rough out there that one year, when the Boy Scouts took milk to a weekend campout, it was butter when they arrived.

To the east is Boise, Les Bois, City of the Trees. Beyond Boise, a landscape of bald hills, bleakness, and creepy silence takes over. You can see for a hundred miles out there, but why would you want to? What is there to look at but dull green clumps of sagebrush?

Idaho lies well within what Joel Garreau, in his book The Nine Nations of North America, calls "The Empty Quarter." Driving through this place gives me a bad case of the lonelies.

Early explorers of the West sent back reports of long pony rides between watering holes. Still, the idea of vast space appealed to the particularly American dream of every...