scalp confidence: by Anna Webb

Why I Garden

2009-12-28T17:40:00.000-08:00

My local garden/blog heroine, Mary Ann Newcomer, organized an essay contest this year: "Why I Garden," with essays due — most appropriately — by midnight on Dec. 21, the Winter Solstice. Here's the essay I submitted. The story you're about to read, is true.

WHY I GARDEN

I garden because I'm a grazer from way back.

I grew up in an old South Boise neighborhood with trees medieval in scale, where chilly irrigation ditches ran through the dark shade, popping with water skippers.

When you grow up in a place like this, you know what it's like to wake up on a summer
morning, tie your Keds, and set out to look for breakfast. You don't go to the kitchen. You go to your mother's garden for raspberries fresh off the cane; plums plucked from low-hanging branches; and green apples. They're sweet, a little wormy, and one of your friends swears they taste like pancakes around their bruises.

Eat like this during your formative years, and you will never agree to a life without plants.

I tried to be plantless for a while, during a decade-long interlude as an imposter New Yorker. I dug up a tiny sagebrush once when I was home on a visit. Took it back to Manhattan in a paper cup, intending to grow it on the windowsill of my Avenue A apartment. You already know how that turned out.

Plant ended up as dry grey shavings in a muslin bag. At least it smelled like home. And some people call the smell of sage as narcotic as heroin for a westerner like me.

Pretty soon, when I realized my favorite place in the City was actually kind of rural — a community garden on Houston Street that grew tropic, with hibiscus, and turtle pools, and true blue morning glories on the chainlink — I packed up my things, and moved back home.

Some ten years later, I have a tiny garden of my own. It's all possibility there. I want to plant an alphabet garden, labeled and fastidious, with one plant for each letter. Acanthus is a perfect "a." Acanthus grows big and showy. Probably why Romans decided to stick it on the tops of Corinthian columns. But go with acanthus' common name, and you get the letter "b."

To his friends, old, grand, columnar acanthus is "bear breeches."
Bear breeches. Bear pants. I don't think there's much funnier in the botanical world than bear pants on a column.

So I garden for the humor, not just the bear pants, but the sinister "Bela Lugosi" daylily, and the blossoms of the dicentra that look like a bathing beauty in a tub when you pull them apart.

I also garden for the home sentiment of place.

To plant the letter "Q," which is truly a challenge, I would go with quince.
A quince tree grows on the edge of my old back yard, where my parents still live, and my mom still gardens. The quince tree is not beautiful. Its fruit, in the pesticide-free yard — the reason our dogs always live so long, say the vets, and the reason I could graze in a freewheeling way — is measly and pocked.
The smell of the fruit is sweet and clean, though, a smell you might choose if someone told you to designate a representative aroma for the year 1932. The color for that year, by the way, would be fly-paper yellow.

When my grandmother was alive, she made jelly out of the quinces from this tree. The jelly was clear, pale pink. The tree is not beautiful, but its jelly was.

Special Olympics World Winter Games: A-go-go

2009-02-25T10:46:00.000-08:00

Covering the Special Olympics World Winter Games for the Statesman was a whirlwind — wrangling press passes, weathering high decibel youth rallies, dodging the assignment that loomed, to interview Olympic skater Scott Hamilton about his eight rules for good living (rule number two: heed the "Almighty Coach!")
But it was heartening, too.
I wrote a couple times about the McCollum family from Illinois. I met them on the first day of competition, and again on the last, after Susan McCollum, their daughter/niece/sister had won the bronze medal for figure skating. The McCollums all wore sweatshirts with iron-on images of Susan in her skating costume.
Seven relatives made it out to Idaho to don the sweatshirt, and watch her compete. Her dad had shot about 17,000 hours of video at the rink and was looking forward to inflicting it on his relatives and friends back home. "They better like movies," he told me.
You have to love that kind of family affection, Special Olympics or not.
It reminded me of something from my own family that still kind of chokes me up.
My brother used to be a serious cyclist. My parents drove all over hell-and-gone, a.k.a. every cardio-crunching elevation in Idaho to watch his races. This generally meant standing on a roadside in the sun, or sometimes the wind, for hours, only to catch a glimpse of the pack as it passed and disappeared around a bend. Not a spectator-friendly sport, is what I'm saying.
But they'd go anyway. One of them would even run out into the road to slip my brother a bottle of water, or a banana to put in that zippered compartment in the back of his jersey as he sped by, usually in a foul mood.
With giant events like the World Games, I worry that they will also come and be gone. I don't know if the games changed anyone's perception of other people.
I don't know if organized events ever create change.
The visit of the Dalai Lama to Sun Valley back in 2005 had the same effect on me. A discomfort with the mass movement for "goodness."
Everybody wore matching scarves then, too, as you'll recall. White ones, blessed by his holiness himself rather than a fleet of world-wide knitters.
I still have an image seared in my memory, all those rows of people, including me, mind you, in sunglasses and scarves, and those rubber Lama bracelets made, unfortunately, in China, taking in that easily digested message of compassion — or what I like to call, "Lama lite."
I'm suspicious of giant happenings, especially those with professionally designed logos, that continually insist that they're life-changing, and give too many knob heads the chance to congratulate themselves on their great humanitarianism.
I just don't know.
I do know that I liked what Evelyn Grime, mother of Kaitlyn, a six-year-old who has Down syndrome, said when I met her at Young Athletes, a Special Olympics program that gets little kids interested in sports.
Grime said she appreciated that the games were raising the curtain on families like hers that live, and thrive, with children with developmental disabilities.
"It's nice to have this attention," Grime said, "We've been here all along."

More proof of Italian high style...

2009-01-31T09:47:00.000-08:00

In Italy, you're likely to:

1. Sleep on sheets printed with giant slices of cantaloupe...

2. Find chocolate easter eggs as big as watermelons, wearing hats, yours for 230 euros.

3. Turn on the television and see women dressed as mice.

4. Find that nose hair clippers are a more desirable, and fashionable item than you knew.

Pizza, love and fantasy

2009-01-07T20:38:00.000-08:00

Italians demonstrate panache and undeniable style by...

Printing portraits of David Niven and Sophia Loren on their take-out boxes and filling them with pizza, love and fantasy.

(Bologna, Italy, 2005)

New York City, 1988: Pilgrim girl vs. cockroaches

2009-01-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

I moved to New York City a month after my college graduation. Late 1980s, I was 23. I finished my last college class in December and was in New York City by the next February. I remember nothing about the preparation for this adventure besides shopping for a new set of cooking pans at the Bon with my mom and putting $1,000 of savings into travelers' checks to bring with me.
I also forced myself to look at the Sunday New York Times at the Boise Public Library. I read the job and apartment listings because it seemed like I should. But classified ads about a place I didn't know, and jobs I couldn't imagine, were far too abstract.
I always thought my brother, Peter, was right when he said that for my generation, living in New York City for a time was a cultural imperative. He didn't go. He went to East Germany for a time instead, which says something about him and his freedom from cultural imperatives.
My college roommate Katharine, and a friend of hers from high school, found the apartment we lived in. A building on E. 22nd Street. This street was as abstract to me as the classifieds, mere shapes and lines in my Michelin guide. But my new address was near Gramercy Park. This was a place I loved, at least from the outside, since I'd never been inside New York's lone private park. I had admired it, urchin-like through the iron gates, though, during many past trips to the city.
Our apartment had a low-ceilinged, chilly basement room that I shared with Katharine. White walls, short, grey, industrial carpet, a scent of new drywall and aftershave that hinted a man had lived there last, and florescent light that I tried to never turn on.
If there's anything worse than the sight of one's face and body under florescent overhead light, I have never known it.

This basement room would provide me with an indelible image that still rankles me 20 years later: florescents turned on in panic after a distinct sensation: insect feet on bare arm. Then spotting a brown, leaf-shaped water bug, lunking its way across the grey carpet.
~~~
I spent a month looking before I found my first job, development assistant at the Guggenheim Museum. Before that, I had a few bad, directionless interviews for editorial assistant positions — the kind of interviews where they say, "Do you have any questions for us?" and you say, "Uh, not really," because you really don't.
My job goal at that time was to find something entry-level, but dignified, not embarrassing to tell people about, and not entirely at odds with my interests, which were then, what they are now, art and writing.
The museum job was dignified, even if it paid $15,000 a year. It saved me from that certain sense of "outlaw" — walking around in the middle of the day when everyone else has somewhere to be, counting up quarters to see if I really should spring for that cappuccino. And back then, before grunge music and Seattle-mania made it popular, coffee was cheap. Cappuccino was just an ethnic take on a cheap drink.
I was so relieved to get the Guggenheim job that I can still remember the sensation, riding the subway back downtown in the chilly mid-morning after my last interview, knowing I would have a place to be.
For the final interview, I'd worn an outfit I considered very stylish, but which, in retrospect, resembled a pilgrim costume. It was a flowy, tentish black Laura Ashley dress with a big white collar and a longish necktie attachment. I wore black hose, low black heels, a jacket with padded shoulders and grey plastic buttons meant to look like granite. I wore my hair in a long braid and the candelabra earrings I favored at the time.
When my boss-to-be, a Park Avenue matron with a girlish nickname, gave me the job, she also gave me two big, soft-cover catalogues of paintings in the Guggenheim's permanent collection.
Whether meant as a prize, initiation or study guide, I couldn't believe my good fortune, getting such books for free. I carried them home on my lap. They've been in my bookshelf in every apartment and house I've lived in since.
I wish I could say I was thrilled at the idea of being among great art, and that I had a plan worked up in my head that would transform me from assistant, to curator. I did love the building. I loved walking in the employee entrance every morning. I loved the nondescript door that led from our offices right onto the spiraling ramp of paintings. I loved walking through the collection, alone on Mondays when the museum was closed.
But the truth is, my happiness about getting that job was grounded in relief, not in ambition.
I've felt versions of that particular sense of joyful, weightless relief throughout my life.
As a little kid it came from studying for tests and getting all the answers right, seeing that glorious red "A," sometimes accompanied by a "+," at the top of the page.
My private celebration back then was to sing Simon and Garfunkle's "The 59th Street Bridge Song," quietly to myself on my walk home. The line, "I've got no deeds to do, no promises to keep," was code for: I got an A on the test and now I don't have to worry.
As an adult, the sensation of joyful, weightless relief has mostly come from getting a job I wanted.
There's that magical period of time, before the new job actually starts, but you know it's there, secured. It feels like a suddenly clear conscience.

Little spud in the big city

2009-01-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

Last spring, a new eatery just north of Union Square, New York City, was showing off a cutting edge menu: baked spuds with an array of delicious items to put on top.

The proprietors were also showing off cutting edge window design in the form of authentic "gunnies." The very burlap containers that the dads of you, me, and every other true Idahoan worth their tubers have hanging in the garage, filled with various western items.

In our case, that's the pump for my dad's fishing boat.

We also have gunnies in the back of the family car. For what, I don't know. To carry firewood? Dispose of road kill? Keep the apples you've just gotten at a u-pick-'em orchard from rolling around in the back seat? To throw down in case you have to sit on something dirty?

My dad says you can't go anywhere without a gunny.

But it's still weird to see a bunch of them on 18th Street.

Let there be no mistake...

2008-12-30T13:56:00.000-08:00

A long morning spent at the Western Idaho State Fair allowed me to confirm something I have long suspected: Goats are half-martian, half-dog. Pictured here, Idaho Statesman reporter with numerous martian-dogs, Livestock Pavilion, August, 2008.

(Photo by Kerry Maloney for The Idaho Statesman)

Is that a gun in that monkey's pocket...or is he just happy to see me?

2008-07-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

When you go to the zoo, you expect to see monkeys, maybe a brooding vulture. You don't expect to see visitors with handguns. But you would have, had you visited Zoo Boise Saturday morning.

About ten members of the local chapter of OpenCarry.org, a national group that advocates for citizens' rights to openly carry handguns, met there for a morning out.

After a little confusion at the front gate about whether it's legal to pack unconcealed heat at the zoo — it is, if you're in Idaho — the group, all visibly armed, bought tickets and sauntered in, past the concession stand with the dino fries, and bins of plush toys.

Naturally, I wanted the members of OpenCarry to be bandoleered like Mexican revolutionaries. I was there to write a newspaper story after all, and I'm always hoping for a detail like that.

Alas, the closest thing I saw to a bandoleer was the black belt, studded with silver hearts, that held the holster of Carol, a friendly open carrier from Nampa.

(For those of you not from this part of the world, Nampa is a town near Boise known for its sugar beet factory and box store sprawl where you're really likely to hear someone say, "Wow, I remember when that car dealership was a potato field.")

Bandoleerless, Carol left her sunglasses on the whole time we talked and proclaimed herself a big fan of home schooling, along with the firearms.

Carol has gone through the steps, the training and the background check, to qualify for a concealed weapons permit. Hiding your weapon, rather than wearing it like jewelry, is the next step up in personal safety.
Though she now considers her holster as integral a part of her wardrobe as her underwear, she can still imagine an unarmed world.

"In an ideal society, one of peace and people taking control of their own lives, you wouldn't need a gun," she said.

Unfortunately, said fellow OpenCarry.org member Blaine of Eagle (another town near Boise, where the presence of a cupcake store indicates its relative prosperity), the world is a dangerous place of random shootings — even in malls and churches. Going through life unarmed? Folly.

The former military man said he's not a vigilante and has no desire to chase down criminals.

"When seconds count, police are still minutes away," he said.

Neither Carol nor Blaine has ever had to use their gun in self defense.

They have been asked to leave private property, though, like restaurants and stores where their guns made people nervous.

Lt. Alan Cavener of the Boise Police Department said that when it comes to carrying guns in public, reason has to play a part.

"We support peoples' constitutional rights, but we also want to ensure public safety. People need to use common sense about where they choose to bring a firearm," Cavener said.

The OpenCarry zoo visitors were trying to make the point that bringing your pistol, along with your middle schooler, to look at the monkeys was common sense.

"Coming to the zoo was something we could do together, like any family would," said Carol.

The only other reporter who showed up to cover the story, was a handsome, square-jawed tv guy. He was all over one particularly photogenic clan of open carriers.

The dad wore a Smithsonian t-shirt. The kids, a couple meek-looking, doe-eyed daughters and a boy, were all too young to carry their own handguns. They wore holsters, holding little knives and canisters of pepper spray instead.

Zoo visitor Laura, from Salem Ore., questioned whether it was really necessary for someone besides a staffer working closely with dangerous animals to carry a gun at the zoo — legality aside. Saturday morning, the most ominous threats appeared to be runaway strollers and kids throwing tantrums.

"Legal and appropriate are two different things," said another visitor, Alex from Boise.

POST SCRIPT:

I wrote my story. It ran in the paper. I am not a fan of guns, or "carrying," open or otherwise. In my personal life I've been vocal about that. In fact, the one time I've been abandoned by a man in a restaurant, was when I told a him I would not live in a house if there were guns inside it, even if said guns belonged to George Washington, or something. He got offended and stormed out.

OK, so there were other issues in that relationship, but still.

In the newspaper business, as a reporter, you're honor-bound to write about things fairly, regardless of your personal thoughts. So what I tend to do, because I'm so afraid of looking biased, is that I usually end up sounding sympathetic to the side I'm personally against. Also, I inevitably end up liking most of the people I talk to, or hitting it off in some weird way. Like when Carol told me she got her studded leather belt at Fred Meyer, on sale, looked at me and said, "I know. Cool, right?"

I always get this Rodney King, "can't we all get along" thing. Not the best for a reporter.

So the fallout from this piece was, I got a few emails from gun enthusiasts who were really appreciative of the article. I think they thought I was on their side.

The truth is, I will never think that a family that open carries is just like any other family. And this is coming from a true, native daughter of the Wild West. As a kid, I watched Gunsmoke regularly. One of my earliest crushes was on Matt Dillon. Sheriff Matt Dillon.
I got bags of beef jerky in my Christmas stocking every year, was terrorized by uniquely western fears, like, would it hurt if I fell into Old Faithful at Yellowstone Park, or would I be instantly par-boiled and feel nothing?

I did own a weapon.
I remember one Saturday when my dad took me and my brother to the sporting goods store so we could get our own knives.

I chose a little pearl-handled pocket knife. As I recall, the attraction was the pearl-handle --really pretty -- not the blade.

(A sign posted near the ranch of coyote-lovers outside Ketchum, Idaho. A second sign on the property reads: "'Happy' is our pet coyote. He warns our dogs when the wolves are near." Only in Idaho — maybe in Montana and Wyoming as well — will you find such a constellation of canines.)

The first ones of the season

2008-07-16T16:50:00.000-07:00

Finally, after a year of strategic planting of lots of scarlet things, my first up-close encounter with a hummingbird. These creatures are nothing less than magical. I have planted three tall agastaches. "Tutti-frutti" variety in the front yard. I was crouched down by one the other evening, weeding out inadvertent cantaloupes grown from "composted" seeds. I heard and felt that particular flapping buzz that seems to entirely change the air around it, that always means a hummingbird is near. And there he was, satiny green, going blossom to blossom on the agastache right next to me. I don't actually think he knew I was there. So I didn't move anything but my eyeballs, watching him.

My earlier up-close encounter with a hummingbird was more taxidermic in spirit. Walking along the sidewalk one day a couple summers ago, I looked down and saw a newly-dead hummingbird. I picked him up and carried him home, sandwiched between two geranium leaves. He was that small.

I inspected him on the kitchen table for a long time. Because how often do you get the opportunity to see a fully intact, stationary hummingbird?

I saw a long, dry, thread-like tongue. Grey-green feathers like epaulettes on his shoulders. I put him in a Ziploc bag and put him in the freezer. When I look at him now, he seems even smaller and his green color is almost gone.

He shares the freezer with a goldfinch, found lying outside a state office building. Intact also. I suspect a collision with a plate glass window did him in.

Battered and broken, the Hulk comes home

2008-07-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

Broken feet in the air. Face down in a ditch. Green skin pock-marked and scratched. Sure, it looked like the aftermath of a 24-hour bender. But it wasn't the Hulk's fault. Purloined from the sidewalk outside the Outpost 12 comic book store on State Street in Boise Thursday night, the seven-foot papier maché sculpture met an ignominious end in a drainage ditch at the bad end of 36th Street.

Following what one of the Hulk's owners, Ray Egusquiza, described as a "semi-anonymous" phone call Friday night from someone claiming to work for "the highway department," the shattered super hero cum art project was hauled from the muck. He's currently in seclusion in the Outpost 12 game room. "His arm is sitting on a table all by itself. Yeah, it's kind of depressing," Egusquiza said.

Egusquiza, who has an art degree and crafted the Hulk, is taking the vandalism hard. He had planned to start a new project, a life-sized Supergirl, intended as the Hulk's companion. But that will have to wait.

Egusquiza believes the Hulk can be repaired, but estimates the job may require "two or three weeks of dedicated work."

Healing the emotional injuries may take longer.

"At first I was mad. But at the same time, I thought it was kind of nice that someone thought the Hulk was good enough to steal," Egusquiza said. "But then, finding out they dumped him in a ditch. That was crushing."

The Hulk had only spent about a week and a half on the job before his assault. But in that short time he had begun to develop a following.

"We had whole families coming in. Kids would pose with the Hulk, parents would take pictures," Egusquiza said. "We took him in and out every day with a handcart," Egusquiza added wistfully.

Outpost 12 co-owner Jeff Doyle was helping a customer at about 8:30 p.m., Thursday, when he saw two men in a white pickup truck leave the smoke shop nearby. They threw the Hulk into their pickup and sped away.

Egusquiza believes the Hulk will reassume his post outside the shop after he recovers. "But he'll be secured with a nice, big chain," the artist said.

Rat-A-Rama brings ardent rodent lovers to Boise

2008-06-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

The sixth annual Rat-A-Rama was an event on a mission: To dispell unflattering myths about the frequently benighted creatures.

RatsPacNW, a rat fanciers club with around 300 members across the Pacific Northwest and Canada, hosted the "fancy rat show and educational fair" at the Idaho Humane Society on Saturday.

According to rat lovers like Lynn Rosscamp, a certified show rat judge who came all the way from Seattle for Rat-A-Rama, rats have personalities that combine the best of cats — independence — with the best of dogs — loyalty and a pack mentality. She fell in love with rats years ago, after her boyfriend adopted a retired rat from a science lab. She found him "charming," which went for the boyfriend, too. She married him, and got more rats.

"Once you go rat, you'll never go back," Rosscamp said.

She had a good day Saturday. Mitsu, her newly-adopted "Russian Blue Wheaton Burmese," a rat undeniably pretty as rats go, with a soft grey coat that looked like a sweater you would definitely want to wear, took the Best of Show prize in the "solid color kitten" category. Yes, rats younger than 14 weeks are known as kittens.

The ideal time to show a rat is when it's between four and nine months old. That's a rat's "prime beauty time," Rosscamp explained. "After a year, you get that middle-aged spread."

Michelle Carroll, a Rat-A-Rama organizer, raises rats in Boise and cares for abandoned pet rats or "rat rescues." Her favorite rat variety is the "hairless" — which looks a little like Yoda from "Star Wars" wearing a loose, pink suit. The sight of these animals, flopped in one of the rat hammocks Carroll designs and sells, could likely melt the stoniest heart of a rat-hater. The movie, "Ratatouille," featuring animated chef rats, helped the image of rats, too, Carroll said. But it also had an effect similar to the release of "101 Dalmatians" when people adopted puppies too hastily without considering the work that goes into owning a pet who is not animated.

"We had a lot more rat rescues after that movie," Carroll said.

For Robbi Schaecher of Tacoma, rescue worked in the other direction.

Caring for her pet rats helped her recover from an eating disorder, she said. Being around them calmed her, and she liked coming home to find them waiting for her in their cage. In addition to Aaron, a squishy, handbag-sized rat who perched on her shoulder, and Joanna, a sleek rat who won a satin ribbon in the "marked kitten" category, Schaecher has made a lot of human friends through her interest.

She drove to Boise with fellow rat enthusiasts, a score of competition rats and several rescued rats available for adoption.

The night before the big show, she and the others formed an assembly line at Michelle Carroll's house. One person washed the rats in the sink with baby shampoo, another person dried them, and someone else clipped their toenails.

From the looks of the scratches on her neck and shoulders, Schaecher appeared to have gotten toenail duty quite a few times.

"They're my battle scars," she said.

One dam, one day

2008-05-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

The Swan Falls Dam complex sits at the bottom of a rocky basalt canyon that zig-zags through the desert south of Kuna.
Oh, and Kuna, for those of you who do not know Idaho, sits in the desert south of Boise.
This should tell you a lot about the geography in our part of the world.
After the attacks on 9-11, federal officials decided Swan Falls Dam — the first hydroelectric dam on the Snake River, built at the turn of the last century — was vulnerable as a terrorism target. So, while the modern part of the complex is still churning out power, officials closed the dam's hundred-year-old powerhouse and, most unfortunately, the small hydroelectric museum inside.
At least they open the museum one day a year and let the public in. Saturday is that day. I wrote a story for The Statesman about it, and spent the morning touring the site with the Idaho Power spokesman.

Here are some reasons why I think it's worthwhile to go to Swan Falls:

1. The approach to the edge of the canyon, and the first look down at the dam straddling the brown river below is worth the drive all by itself. The Idaho Power guy told me a man tried to commit suicide by driving over the edge. He didn't know a ledge below would stop his fall, and strand him. Dam workers heard the guy howling to be rescued.

2. The Trade Dollar Mining and Milling Company built the dam in 1901 to supply power for the mines the company built in nearby Silver City. Horses and oxen hauled all the building material for the dam from the railroad line in Kuna, to the bottom of the canyon. The canyon walls are so steep, this seems impossible, but it actually happened.

3. The landscape of dark basalt cliffs, giant boulders and rocky spires on the far edge of the canyon are remarkable against a daytime sky. This morning the sky was grey-blue. The sun was out with a bit of a warm wind coming up off the water.

4. The dam and its reservoir lie within the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area. You might see falcons, hawks, owls. You will definitely see swallows. These are among my favorite birds. They’re small. They dart. Their body is a sleek, shiny indigo with a rust-colored belly. I can't see them without thinking of Persian carpets.

5. Inside the powerhouse, a bright, quiet, industrial space, you can look out casement windows and see up-river and down-river at the same time.

6. The powerhouse is made of molded concrete, like parts of the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. In both places, you can still see the marks of the wood plank molds.

7. You will never again see so many amusing vintage ads for electric power in one place. An especially notable ad pictures a farmer and a farmwife, “Handy Andy” and “Handy Annie.” Each is drawn having more arms than Shiva. The arms represent the ways electricity can help a person by lightening their load — from curling hair, to grinding meat, to massaging scalps to cooking waffles and grooming animals.
Another ad urges one to “Be a shadow-chaser” by stocking up on light bulbs.

The most adorable ad may be one featuring the "Electrikats," a family of black cats who wear human clothing and appear to have electrified tails. In the ad, a human couple is struggling to cook food on their wood stove. Mrs. Electrikat, who has used an electric stove instead, is already serving dinner to her waiting, forks in hand, family.

8. The old equipment inside the powerhouse, from the steel cranes and giant hooks overhead that moved heavy equipment around the plant, to the turbine shaft that resembles a giant egg-beater, to the “wicket” gates that controlled the amount of water coming into the turbines, is all 100 years old. But it is so solid and so obviously well made, it looks like you could switch it all back on right this minute and power a city. And then, for fun, bring a Frankenstein monster to life.

9. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me inside the powerhouse’s control room, or "nerve center," as I like to say. But imagine this. The control panel inside is made of solid granite. The end result may be elegance. But the reason was safety. Granite wouldn’t conduct an electric charge that might have shocked the controller.

10. The modern part of the dam, which actually won't be open for touring, is the manliest place I've been for a long time, maybe ever. Hard hats and blue denim work coveralls hang on hooks on the wall. The sole bathroom has a urinal and a big pile of magazines. They aren't girlie magazines like I was expecting, but Mopar, Muscle Car, magazines instead. A couple bars of Lava Soap rested on the counter.

The place broke with manliness in one way. The dam gets turbines from Austria. The Austrians like to name the turbines after sexy women from a certain pin-up calendar. The Swan Falls men put the kibosh on Ursula and Liesel and renamed the turbines after little girls who have gone missing from small Idaho towns and met a bad end.

Trees, suffering and enemies

2008-05-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

I used to believe that the world was a balanced and just place. That if I were pained about something, but did my time and paid the pain tab, then something good would happen to me in the same measure to balance out the bad thing. I believed I would get a consolation prize that was just as good as whatever I had lost. My belief that the world worked like that probably came from the transformation stories that were everywhere when I was a kid: the awkward girls who turned into heart-throbs; the underdog wearers of ratty gym clothes who became tennis champions.
My personality and body — melancholy optimism edged with Pollyanna in an unusually tall girl — made me vulnerable to these stories and I believed them. Or, I did, until one of my friends, a poet well read in a dangerous way, shared this line with me from Dostoevsky.
"There is only one thing that I dread," the Russian said, "not to be worthy of my sufferings."
Somehow, until that moment, I had managed to ignore the possibility that I could have a dark time and it would never swing over into light, that I could have trouble or disappointment that would never pay off in a tennis trophy or an engagement ring or some equivalent prize.
Having this realization might sound like the normal learning curve one takes into adulthood, had it not happened this year, when I am 43. Maybe I was lucky to be able to suspend the truth about the world's lack of balance for as long as I did, but the landing into reality felt like a hard one when it finally happened.
Fortunately, a piece of literature from a very different time reminded me of another way to look at pain and pain's pay-offs — the novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," a staple on fifth-grade reading lists everywhere.
I had wanted to re-read this book, because even though a lot of time had passed since I read it when I was a fifth-grader myself, an image from the book had always stayed with me. It was blood, coughed up onto a down pillow by a young man dying of consumption. The family in the story was poor so they didn't throw the bloody pillow in the garbage after the man died. They covered it with new cloth and gave it away as a present. The recipient of the gift never knew about the blood, dried and secret under the soft, white cotton.
I wanted to know if that image were actually as unsettling as I remembered it. Because some images, capable of making you feel as though your gut is tickling up into your lungs the first time you encounter them, have no staying power. I speak, for example, of James Cagney's trussed-up dead body, delivered to his mother's apartment in the 1931 film "The Public Enemy." He tumbles, eyes wide-open, towards the camera and it's horrifying. But the second time you see the movie, dead Jimmy's tumble is a little less shocking. By the third time it's just Hollywood corny.
The consumption pillow, for what it's worth, has staying power. The image is every bit as gruesome as I remembered it.
But what resonated with me as much in my re-read of the book, were passages about Brooklyn kids with head lice.
The children without lice would taunt the children with lice. When the children with lice got kerosened free of the pests, those very children would join the group of lice-free taunters. Their experience, wrote author Betty Smith, humiliating as it was, taught them no empathy.
It's different now, in this relatively easy world that's not so hard-scrabble as turn-of-the-century New York, with all its vermin and coughed-up lung blood, Triangle Shirtwaist fires and airless tenements. "Sufferings" do teach empathy. Maybe Dostoevsky would have considered the acquisition of a sympathetic heart an adequate pay off.

Things that are possible with flowers

2008-04-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

The thaw is here and things are growing. On a lark, I wrote up an alphabetical list of all the perennial flowers that will grow happily in Idaho without much care or water. I included as many natives as I could think of and the list is a riot of common and botanical names. Some flowers, like the chocolate flower, officially "berlanderia," straddle the alphabetical B-C border.
The chocolate flower is a genuinely freakish thing. Smallish yellow daisies on kind of grey foliage that you wouldn't think much of. Until you smell them. No kidding, it's like breathing in a cup of cocoa.
Then, of course, the baptista is a straddler too, that could fall under "B" but also under "F" or maybe "I" as false indigo.
I filled in all the letters, except for Q and X.
If desperate I can go with quince for Q. It's a tree, of course. But not a tree without a personal significance for me.
A quince tree grows on the edge of my parents property. It's not a beautiful tree and its fruit, in their pesticide-free yard, is measly and pocked. But the smell of the yellow fruit is sweet and clean, and a smell you might choose, were you called upon, for some reason, to designate a representative smell for the year 1932. (The color for that year, by the way, would be fly-paper yellow).
When my grandmother was alive, she made jelly out of the quinces from this tree. The jelly had a delicate flavor and was clear, pale pink. The tree is not beautiful but its jelly was. And I liked to pop the wax seal out of the top of a new jar and lick the pink off the wax.
It may be impossible to find an X plant and I may have to cheat, resort to finding a flower with an X-shaped center, or something like that.
I've thought that maybe I should plant an alphabetical garden, all labeled and fastidious. The idea came after I spotted a perfect "a" plant -- acanthus.
We have acanthus at the greenhouse where I work on Mondays (the one day a week I am not a newspaper reporter).
Apparently it can grow very big and showy. Acanthus does always look that way on Corinthian columns. But it straddles an alphabetical line, too. Its fancy name, acanthus, gives way to comedy in its common name: bear breeches.
Breeches are pants, right? Bear pants? That's comedy.
Another garden project I would like to do is to collect a list of all the ways one can transform certain blossoms into certain other things.
So far, I know of three:
— snapdragon: well, the blossom does look like a dragon head, and you can pinch it and make the "jaw" move.
— hollyhock (alcea, for science): you can pick a blossom, and turn it over so it's like a little skirt. Then, poke a hole in the top with a nail. Pick a blossom that hasn't bloomed yet and is still a hard, green ball. Leave a little stem to be a neck, and stick it in the skirt. Then it's a hollyhock woman.
— bleeding heart (dicentra, for science): I just learned this one at the greenhouse. Pick one of those little puffy hearts. Pull it apart gently and the pistil (?) looks like a naked lady sitting in a bathtub.
All of this is much better than that old "he loves me, he loves me not," petal plucking business, isn't it?
Besides, you always knows the answer to that question, even before you start to pluck.

Mosaic altar 1

2007-10-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

(Photograph: Brad Talbutt)

This year I submitted four mosaic "altar pieces" for consideration in the Boise Art Museum Triennial. I made the first cut — some 250 applicants down to 70. But I did not make the second cut, which was far more cruel ... 70 down to 25. But the top 70 artists each got a live studio visit from the BAM curator, something that inspired me to paint my studio walls (rosewood pink, to play up my love of iridescent glass) and hire the very talented artist and craftsman Andrew Traub to hang my pieces as though they were in a museum.
And he did. We chose to build little frames on the backs of the panels so the pieces float a bit off the walls. Not to get too religious about it, but such an arrangement makes sense for altar pieces.
I started thinking of the mosaics as altar pieces for a couple reasons. One, the iridescent glass I use. I find it impossible to not stare at it, which inevitably puts me into a somewhat dopey state that could just as easily be meditative and not quite of this world.
The other reason was more practical. Mosaic is still living down the idea some people have that it's "craft," you know, kind of like sock monkeys. I've never seen mosaic that way ... but then, I'm also a lover and doer of illustration, which has certain reputations of its own.
I thought combining panels into larger, multi-section arrangements would give them some gravitas.
Alas, whatever gravitas I summoned wasn't enough to get me into the show. I'll try again in three years.
This particular mosaic is one I think of as a "storm" altar. I made the big spiral section while I was listening to reports of the Hurricane Katrina disaster on NPR. I couldn't stop listening. I was thinking of turbulance and waves of energy, but also the colors, sometimes lurid, of New Orleans, a city I've visited more times (3) than would really make sense for a westerner like me. Twice, with two different boyfriends. Once on my own to do, of course, mosaic, and look at cemeteries. And smell fragrant flowers the likes of which do not grow west of the Mississippi. And realize how much I love New Orleans gardens, the ones that are overgrown and hidden from the street, but are right in the middle of town, none-the-less.

The Masters of Display

2007-10-23T18:57:00.001-07:00

Laurel calls Ghanaians the “masters of display.” Indeed. Even lumps of coal in tall gunny-sacks are lined up like little men along the road, with chunks of coal on the top of the bags, arranged like crowns. Big, rough brown yams look elegant when arranged in pyramids.
Ghanaians sell vermillion palm oil in gallon jugs. Even at the most modest road-side joints, the jugs are stacked into architectural forms.

Die Fledermaus on the Equator

2007-10-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Fruit bats congregate in the middle of the city and hang from the trees on a busy road in a neighborhood known as “Area 37.” They fly, even in the daylight, chirping and singing. When they light on a branch, they hang like big black teardrops. A remarkable thing to see is sunlight, shining through the thin skin of a bat’s wing.

The Business of Christianity

2007-10-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

Real names of real businesses in Ghana:
- Humble Aluminum
- End Times Communications
- Praise God with Instruments (abbreviated Instrumpts’ on the sign)
- King of Kings Brake Center
- Why Can’t I Thank My Jesus Mini-Mart
- The Holy Innocents Auto Parts
- Thank Jesus Fashion Home

Then there was this one, Right Step Ventures, greeting us every day on our walk home with a gangster, and a baby making a phone call.

And one more, not Christian, but memorable: Mamalee’s Ultimate Night Snacks

The Small Boy System

2007-10-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

Ghana, it seems, is without systems. Just because something is true one day, doesn’t seem to mean it will be true again. Ordering food in a restaurant, then getting a breakdown of the check can take an hour. And sometimes, in between ordering, eating, and asking for the check, the prices of the food change.
One system entirely intact, however, is something we came to call the “small boy system.”
Need something? A bag of sugar? A nail? A dish pan? To send a message to someone across town?
In Ghana a small boy is always nearby to make it happen.
A “small boy,” as a small boy himself told us, is any boy 14 years old or younger.
Here is a perfect example of the small boy network at its finest: I was walking in Nungua when I stepped crooked, twisted my ankle and snapped the strap on my sandal.
What to do? Impossible to walk without the strap and Aba House, where we were staying, was far away.
Miraculously, as we stood, looking at my broken shoe, pondering our options, a small boy appeared at my side, offering to help.
We had a quick negotiation and gave him a few bills.
He took my shoe and ran across the street with it, disappearing through a maze of traffic, goats and noise.
In minutes the small boy was back - my shoe repaired, and shined clean – left over change in his hand.
We gave him the change from the repair for his troubles. He appeared delighted, and ran away, back across the street.
The ease of that exchange would have been impossible in the United States.

Scalp confidence 1

2007-10-21T15:32:00.001-07:00

Driving through southern Ghana, you will have time to study the roadside, because there will be cars, and vans and tro-tros (Ghanaian version of a taxi) all with engines running, all with exhaust streaming, all keeping you in one place for a long time. Many of the larger trucks will have Christian blessings painted across their backsides. But despite this goodness of spirit, you will be stuck, in the midst of too many cars on roads that are too skinny. And very often deadly.
Stay long in Ghana and you will learn that in some families, every other child has died in a car crash.
But never fear, because as it often does in this, the former colonial Gold Coast, the English language will delight you.
A billboard in the steamy air, a beautiful, smiling woman, advertising personal grooming products that promise "Scalp confidence."
And as you sit there with your caucasian head, waiting for the strand of cars to give way, and for every driver to move on to his home in Teshie, Nungua, or Accra, where a tv provides blue light in the wet air, and troupes of small boys, still in their pumpkin-colored school uniforms, scramble with a soccer ball in the dirt that's like powder, you will consider that scalp confidence is a good goal.
At least something good to start with. Having your head clean and solid and causing you no worries.
On another drive on another day, through a more rural place: a hand-lettered sign in chalk: "fresh cat meat and palm wine."
It may occur to you at this point that you are very far from home, where entrées run more towards "Bronco burgers," named for the local college football team, chef salads, and where "exotic" means adding malt syrup to your chocolate shake.

In the same little town on the way to Kumasi, where "Mr. Murphy's Artistic Hair Theatre" offers barbering and, one would guess, access to scalp confidence, brown, round-bellied goats run beside the road.
They resemble moving bagpipes with legs.

Old women walk along, selling rectangular loaves of bread. The words "love" and "hope," written in batter, are baked into the tops of the loaves.
In another neighborhood, a tall green cactus grows into the road. Someone has carved "love," and names, into its flesh.
In Ghana, you are blessed by commerce, by traffic jams, by bread, by cacti.

(All photographs, except for "love cactus," by Lillian Sizemore)