David Triguiero's Idaho

The Dream Girl of WJHS

            When I was mired at 13, fed up with childhood but not yet a convincing teenager, I wanted the same things all boys at that frustrating age want for Christmas: a car and a girlfriend. I wasn’t old enough to drive a car, of course and didn’t even know how, but then I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with a girlfriend either. But in Weiser in 1958 these were the two basic requirements for being cool – a Hep Cat.

            The ultimate car at the time was a 1958 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop with a continental kit on the back and shining chrome all around. At roughly $3,000 – about equal to my father’s earnings for one year – the car was very much part of the childish dream world that most 13-year-olds still cling to in spite of mounting evidence that it could never exist.

            The ultimate girl was marginally more attainable. Raven hair, alabaster skin, Gigi Martinez was pure beauty – the Cadillac against which all girls were measured as in “She’s almost as good as Gigi.” Her advanced age, she was a ninth-grader, completed the alluring and elusive package.

            Despite all this, I felt I had a definite advantage over the rest of Gigi’s scruffy band of admirers. For one thing, she was a classmate and good friend of my older sister and therefore knew who I was. She even said “hi” on the rare occasions our paths crossed in the closely regulated hallways of the junior high school.

            I was still working on developing a suave reply and had to make do with a sheepish half word half grunt. Even so, I considered myself more mature than average – I read Time magazine – and nearly ready to make the move. I intended to have the line ready for delivery at the New Year’s Eve dance.

            I spent the afternoon before the dance assembling my clothes including a new pair of White Buck shoes as worn by Pat Boone in Bernadine, the movie that defined cool in my junior high years.  One serious problem remained – my hair. Just my luck in an era when hair was the single most important element of style for men, mine was a disaster. Three cowlicks, one on either side of my forehead and a huge rooster tail in the rear ruined any chance I had of being a Hep Cat.

            Desperate, I secretly enlisted the help of by best friends older sister, Mary, a professional hairdresser who smoked and went into bars and thus knew everything about human relationships as well as neat hair. She went to work on my cowlicks with the best plaster available to her profession. The result was a shiny jellyroll with two spit curls meeting in the middle of my forehead.

            I hurried home and had just got in the kitchen door when my sister yelled for me to come into the front room.  I burst into the room and was immediately face to face with Gigi flanked by my sister and two other giggling ninth-grade mafiosa. “Neat hair, who’s the lucky girl tonight?” they all chimed. Obviously my sister had got wind something was up and was waiting for me. I was only thankful she had not found out who the “lucky girl” was supposed to be. That would have been a catastrophic humiliation.

            Needless to say, there was no point in using the line at that point, even if it had been ready. That night, while Gigi glided and dipped with the quarterback, oblivious to the heart she had helped to break, I hung around the punch table with the rest of the motley eighth-grade crew talking about cars and occasionally plowing around the floor with safe ordinary girls who didn’t make your palms sweat just looking at them.

Follow the Pioneers to Soda Springs

    Time was anyone driving the Lincoln Highway on the way to Portland or Seattle would go through historical Caribou County with its variety of springs, lakes and rocky sagebrush vistas. For more than 100 years before that, pioneers in search of a new life plodded the same route along the Oregon Trail, which became the footprint for U.S. Highway 30, the first to cross America.

            The Interstate system disrupted that historical route in the late 1950s, but it is still possible to follow the pioneer’s route. Take the Malad City exit off I-15 and drive a few miles to Preston, the town made famous by the movie Napoleon Dynamite.  From there continue east to Bear Lake and turn north on the Oregon Trail Scenic Highway which takes you north to Soda Springs and back to I-15 at Lava Hot Springs.

            On the trail you can pretend to be emigrants headed for Oregon. You will see some of the white mounds of sediment left by soda springs some of them ten or 12 feet in elevation.  Most of these cones have been graded away, but some remaining rocks show this unusual formation. At the Fairview Cemetery in Soda Springs you can see the wagon box grave of a family of emigrants probably killed by Indians when they fell behind the wagon train in 1861.  Also in Soda Springs is the Ninety Percent Spring that produced soda water for the commercial market in the late 19^th Century.

            This is the center of Mormon country and Church of Jesus Christ Ladder Day Saints original President Brigham Young had a cabin here where he stayed on trips north from Salt Lake City to visit settlements. Originally, Soda Springs was a settlement of LDS dissenters known as Morrisites. Named for Joseph Morris, the sect split from the main church body over certain tenets and eventually died out.

            West of Soda Springs is Hudspeth’s Cutoff where emigrants going to California split from the main Oregon Trail in 1849. Previously, pioneers had continued north to Fort Hall near Blackfoot, Idaho before turning south.  On your way back to I-15 at the Mormon ghost town of Chesterfield, 15 miles west of Soda Springs, you can still see wagon ruts of the Oregon-California Trail.

Foreclosed and Forlorn

        Here in Weiser, the recession has already hit harder than the Great Depression in terms of housing. Once, this tidy little town was known for its well-kept yards. Even during the 1930s, the paint may have looked faded on once grand houses and the roofs may look tattered, but the yards and gardens never looked better.  Rows of sweet corn and beans wafted in the summer breeze, melons peeked out from under bright green leaves and potatoes and carrots waited in the ground to be dug up for dinner. There was not a weed to be seen and the lawn was trimmed neat and short with a push mower.

Today the scene has been reversed in Weiser’s better neighborhoods. The houses stand proud under new roofs with their sides covered in fresh paint and never-fade aluminum or vinyl siding. Their windows however are blank and streaked with dirt, cobwebs and bugs. The front yard is brittle with overgrown, dead grass and weeds reaching two or three feet high. The backyards are the same; some littered with broken trampolines, plastic toys and the general flotsam and jetsam left by uncaring people departing in a hurry. 

Washington County, the second poorest in the state, is being abandoned by once middle class people who have lost their jobs to the recession and their homes to the bank. Once there were new cars parked in the driveway, purchased with home equity loans that hucksters flogged on television, in direct mail circulars and door to door at the height of the “ownership America” years.

Many of the houses still occupied have For Sale signs planted in the front lawn. Few have the backyard vegetable gardens that pulled many people through the Great Depression. Their freezers are filled, or not, with frozen pizzas, tater tots and French fries, ice cream and packaged dinners that pass for food in today’s America.

The banks have been saved and the economy is collapsing more slowly; fewer jobs are being lost and the government tells us that the end is in sight. That’s probably why banks are holding on to these foreclosed family dreams rather than sell them short or at a reduced price to people less flagrant in their borrowing habits. That way the whole borrowing and bankrupting cycle can begin again just like nothing happened.

 

 

 

 

 

WALK AND RIDE THROUGH HISTORY ON WEISER RIVER TRAIL

The Weiser River Trail winds nearly 80 miles through farmlands and forests through the most beautiful and least populated counties in Idaho. Along the way are: excellent fishing, wildlife photography, historical sights and friendly small towns and villages. It is ideal for walking, bicycling and horseback riding.
    U.S. Highway 95 runs parallel to much of the trail providing ready access at several points along the way with parking lots, toilet facilities and picnic areas. Overnight facilities are available at Midvale, Cambridge and the Evergreen Campground in the Payette National Forest. It is best to plan your trop well because private land borders much of the trail, particularly at the southern end, and access is restricted
    Numerous farmers and ranchers opposed the 1994 conversion of the abandoned Pacific and Northern Railroad right-of-way into a trail fearing trespassers and “wild parties” along the route. Their fears proved unfounded, but many still resent what they consider an intrusion on their privacy and there can be unpleasant encounters when confusion arises.  Trail maps clearly mark public rest areas and the location of public lands and are readily available in Weiser, Cambridge and New Meadows.
    The small town of Weiser (pronounced Weezer) is at the southern terminus of the trail and is the best place to find overnight accommodation. It is an interesting and historical town once the center of Idaho’s sheep industry, which at the turn of the 20th Century was the largest in the world. It was also the supply center for mines and forestry mills that once dotted what is still known as the Upper Country north of town.
    Weiser was one of the leading towns in southern Idaho at that time, a wild and wooly place with 25 bars and only 12 churches, most of them small clapboard affairs without permanent clergy. By contrast, Payette, 15 miles to the south, had four bars and 30 brick churches filled to the rafters every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.  The Oregon Trail Park on the banks of the Snake River was a famous summer gathering place. People came to Weiser from all over southwest Idaho and eastern Oregon to shop and have fun. 
    Crane Creek Reservoir just north of Weiser has been an excellent place to fish for bass and crappie for more than 75 years. It has supplied irrigation water to the farms surrounding Weiser since 1906 when the Galloway Ditch was completed. Wildlife often sighted along the trail include deer, elk, the occasional bear, hawks and wild turkey (introduced in the 1970s).
    The Friends of the Weiser River Trail (weiserrivertrail.org), a nonprofit organization run by local people, looks after the trail clearing it of weeds, constructing parking lots and leisure areas and organizing events. If you are bicycling, be sure to have well slimed tires and carry a puncture repair kit. Volunteers work hard clearing the trail of puncture vine every year, but it is a devious and destructive opponent.