David Triguiero's Idaho

Hells Canyon Gateway Closed

Before it was filled up with water by three dams some 40 years ago, Hells Canyon was a magnificent sight. Though not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon, it was considerably deeper. In fact, it was advertised as The World’s Deepest Gorge.

            Weiser, my hometown, was The Gateway to Hells Canyon and the home of its legends. Chief among these was The Chief Joseph, the first boat to travel up stream on the Snake River in Hells Canyon and on the middle fork of the Salmon River, the world famous “River of No Return”.

 Since the advent of the jet boat in the late1960s thousands of people have “returned” up the Salmon, but when I was a boy The Chief Joseph was unique. It was a big gray tub of a boat with a flat bottom curving to form the bow. About 20 or 30 feet aft, two huge motors drove the twin propellers that powered her up the Snake and Salmon Rivers. She was covered by canvas tarps and sat neglected in a bay of the old Penny Arcade in Oregon Trail Park. 

The Chief Joseph is gone now as is Oregon Trail Park. A large water treatment plant now takes up most of the small island located at the confluence of the Snake and Weiser Rivers. I don’t know what became of The Chief Joseph, it probably burned up in one of the frequent fires that have plagued Weiser since its founding in the late 1860s.

It wouldn’t have been an “insurance fire” as the run down Oregon Trail Park buildings were not worth anything and were located on public land. Probably it was careless campers or kids playing with matches. We used to play there a lot when I was a kid in the 1950s and we were known to smoke cigarettes and cigars there while pretending to be riverboat gamblers.

During the 1970s when Weiser’s National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and Festival was a favorite stop for roaming motorcycle gangs, Mortimer’s Island (named for the park’s founder John Mortimer) was a favorite camping spot. The gangs never robbed or hurt anyone, but they did turn the fiddle competition into a drinking and orgy festival that drew more participants and observers than the fiddling.

Biker girls stripped to fiddle music on the flat, wooden awnings over the sidewalks in front of bars. Inside the bars there were wet T-shirt contests and more obscene competitions involving men. Tricycle races from bar to bar were organized with the participants chugging a whiskey and beer “boilermaker” at each bar. Out on Mortimer’s Island the orgies continued nonstop.

Meanwhile, at the high school gymnasium, competing fiddlers scraped and scrapped while small crowds of clean living pensioners tapped their cowboy boots in time trying not to think about what was going on in the bars downtown and at the former Oregon Trail Park.

Before long city council outlawed carrying drinks from bar to bar and the police hired dozens of off duty officers from surrounding towns during fiddle week to crack down on “perversion” on Weiser city streets. The water treatment plant was expanded and the rest of Mortimer’s Island turned into a parking lot. The word “festival” was dropped making the annual event simply a fiddlers’ contest.

The motorcycle gangs never returned and neither did the tourists who came to watch them. Mortimer’s Island, a place of fun and games since the early 1900s when the Oregon Trail Park began attracting tourist from all over the Pacific Northwest, was officially dead.

Hells Canyon near Weiser is nothing but a series of lakes good for crappie and catfish fishing, but not much else. White water rafting and other sports available north of the dams, but Weiser is no longer The Gateway to Hells Canyon. 

Football Cheer

It’s fall and time for football. The game, however, is secondary to what hyperbolic announcers always refer to “the grand spectacle of football; the clash of titans; a war of gladiators.” Anyone who has spent six hours watching the Super Bowl will tell you that the best part is usually the halftime show when celebrity rock ‘n’ rollers entertain and sometimes have part of their clothing ripped off.

Even in high school, it’s classy cheerleaders, a blaring band and inspiring halftime shows that win championships, not strong-armed quarterbacks, fleet receivers and brutish linemen. Don’t scoff. Remember the Dallas Cowboys were “America’s team,” everybody’s favorite to win the Super Bowl in the 90s; then the team’s new owner tangled with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. The next year they won only one game and were the perennial 200-to-1 shots to win the championship.

At the high school level, where winning and losing means a lot more, the consequences of alienating those responsible for school spirit can be even more devastating. When I was at Weiser High School, it ended the coaching career of the coach who had been brought in three years earlier to rescue the Wolverines from humiliation.

Weiser High School had as many students as the rest of the schools the Snake River Valley Conference and its football players were just as big and just as talented, but it lacked several important basic ingredients for winning championships. Its so-called drill team, under the direction of civics teacher Margaret Duclos, performed Scottish country-dances wearing full-length red skirts topped by white sweaters. The band provided a perfect compliment. Director Ford Smith’s idea of a fire-up-the-team number was a well-disciplined rendition of The Happy Wanderer.

The cheerleaders tried, but with that kind of backup it was almost impossible to get the Pep Club fired up to chant “Go team, fight, fight. Red and white you’re dynamite.”

Over at Emmett, where the brother of Weiser’s new coach had built a strong football program, the band was all drums and brass and could be heard, nay felt, for miles around when the Huskies were pressing toward the end zone. The drill team, in short skirts and sequins, strutted and high kicked in time while the local citizenry roared for its team.

Weiser’s coach must have known he would have to dislodge Duclos and Smith before that atmosphere could be duplicated and a championship won. But they were institutions. To challenge them was to question God.

A showdown came the week before the Wolverines met the Huskies in the traditional Armistice Day game. It had been the Wolverines’ worst season in memory. Not only were they winless in six games, they had scored only 12 points to their opponents’ 196.

Working through football players and other sympathizers, the coach got a motion before student council calling for more support from the band and rill team. There was a heated debate that culminated in band drum major Susan Millbrook telling quarterback Bobby Sturtevant the football team couldn’t win so there was no point in trying.

 Bobby countered that the team would beat Emmett and rub the band’s face in it. That fired up the whole team and for a couple of days it looked like the Wolverines were ready to pull off the upset of the season. On game day, the band was droning its usual mush and the drill team was chanting, “We’ll roll that red and white, hay-andy-andy...” and other nonsense. But the team was on fire. Guys were slapping each other on the shoulder pads, butting heads and yelling at each other. The euphoria lasted until Virgil Lord, the Huskies’ all-state fullback, ran the opening kickoff back for a touchdown. The game pretty much went downhill from there.

At half time with the score thirty-something to nothing the coach seemed overcome with despair and disgust. For a very long moment he stood at the blackboard fingering a piece of chalk. Suddenly he jerked his head up, spun around and spiked the chalk to the floor with such force it vanished in a puff of dust. “It’s the same old bullshit,” he thundered. There was a beat of silence and then Glenn Reeve’s shoulders began to shake uncontrollably. There were a few sniggers, and then someone snorted sharply and began laughing out loud. Soon the whole team was laughing and the poor coach had no choice but to join in the fun. The team went out and played well holding Emmett to less than 50 points – a moral victory all things considered.

The born-again clique in the staff room did not appreciate how the coach’s outbursts broke the tension, much less see the humor in his outburst. Neither did the Weiser Ministerial Association. The coach found another job.

 

Conspiracy of Republican Transvestites

            I went to Calgary to see my new grandson last week and while there came across some very interesting information on American politics. It seems that Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Pallin are not Americans but Canadians. More than that, they are both men in drag.

 You may find this hard to believe, as did I, but I saw a picture of Hillary wearing a pair of well-filled-out Jockey shorts. I was shown the picture by a kindly old man in the University of Calgary subway station. His name was John DeBruyne and he claims to be the rightful prime minister of Canada. He was standing on the platform handing out handwritten Xeroxed pamphlets to students and others going to the university.

I stopped to chat and he told me he was pushed out as leader of the Conservative Alliance Party by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, also an Albertan, after the last election. This made little sense to me because I remembered Harper campaigning as leader of the party, but he said that was an optical illusion perpetrated by “powers” in control of the media. These consisted of “Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers, Royal Canadian Legion executives, Police Commissioners and news executives who covered up our world’s worse known crime – treason. Crimes classified by even Canada’s psychiatrists as ‘unspeakable and mentally sick, so outrageous no one can open mouths!!!” 

Hillary Clinton’s real name is Howard Gordon, a serial rapist who escaped from a Saskatchewan mental hospital. Sarah Pallin is really Richard Anderson, a convicted child molester and rapist who escaped from a federal prison in British Columbia and made her/his way to Alaska. DeBruyne said this was part of a grand plot by homosexuals and transvestites to take over the world. Integrating Canada and the United States was the first step in a global campaign.

Now, this probably sounds as silly to you as it did to me at first hearing; but as I gave it more thought, it became less preposterous. The connection between DeBruyne’s theories and those of Republican brown shirts at so-called Tea Party protests and virulent disruptions of town hall meetings on health care reform became clearer. The so-called “gay agenda” to destroy American family life. President Barack Obama’s supposed foreign birth. Are these widely held Republican beliefs any more preposterous than DeBruyne’s claims?

Alberta is Canada’s most American province, primarily because its oil and natural gas business attracts US companies and investment. I wouldn’t say George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would feel right at home there, but they do have a number of admirers in Alberta; not all of them expat Americans. There is a local fascist party – The Wild Rose Party -- with a strong religious base composed of Fr. Coughlin style Roman Catholics, Vladimir Putin style Russian Orthodox, American style Evangelicals and a few neocon Jews. 

David Frum, who wrote speeches for Bush and is currently at a far right American think tank, was born in Canada to a very wealthy Toronto family. His mother, Barbara Frum, was a famous broadcaster with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC). His father owned the Canadian franchise of Budget Rent a Car among many other things. He is not a member of The Wild Rose Party, of course, and he is not a transvestite, but the possible connections are nonetheless interesting.

I don’t think there are international conspiracies working at this time.  There are conspirators at work, however, you can see them on Fox News daily and they most definitely are striving to create a national movement against President Obama and African-Americans in the United States.