Hagerman, Idaho

We rarely stop along the road except for gas, food, bathrooms and stretches.  So this morning we blew right on past the sign for the potato museum.  I made some sort of snotty remark about a potato museum, but then I got to thinking that there is probably a lot to know (other than boiled, fried, au gratin, baked or mashed). And sure enough! It originated in Peru and the Spaniards brought it to Europe.  It now thrives across most of the globe and is the fourth largest food crop after corn, wheat and rice.  China has been the world’s biggest producer since 2014. The potato is a brilliant little factory for converting sunlight into carbohydrates. So the museum probably would have been interesting. Wikipedia notes that you may have arrived at the potato site while searching for Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potatoe.  As a poor speller myself, he had my sympathy on that one.

There are miles and miles of potato fields stretching to the mountains along the horizon.  They’re quite beautiful, with the rich, dark green leaves and white flowers.  But I’m struck, as I was passing through miles of corn earlier on the trip, by what a bad idea monoculture looks like. It’s never what nature comes up with.  The prairie that corn, wheat and potato have replaced, was so beautifully varied and resilient, able to host a wide variety of insects who were food to a wide variety of birds and reptiles, and so on up the food chain. It certainly wasn’t as productive as monoculture if your only goal was to feed humans. But the bits of it that remain are beautiful.  I think something in our DNA responds to natural diversity as being beautiful.  Perhaps we know in some way that diversity is healthy for the planet, and thus, in the long run, for us. Instead, we have chosen crop dusters, and imported bees, and chemical fertilizers that run off into the rivers.

We followed the Snake River most of the day. It cuts through deep lava fields.  The last volcanic eruption in the area was over 3000 years ago, and there are a lot of places where the remains are still utterly hostile to plant and animal life.  But there’s plenty of life along the river. The Snake flows over a thousand miles from the Rockies to where it empties into the Columbia and thence to the Pacific. The great rivers once defined this continent, and once you are in open country, they still do.

We’ve come to Hagerman to visit with Skip, who has lived here for 30 years.  It seems like a lovely choice. At 83, Skip has had trouble with carpal tunnel, but seems to be in good health otherwise, and definitely seems to be in good spirits. We had a nice lunch together, and given the heat, we drove off to stay in an RV park where we have electricity for AC, rather than camping in Skip’s driveway. We’re in a nice shaded spot, next to a friendly refugee from Fremont who is looking to move here to escape the crowding of the Bay Area. We’ll drive into town for dinner with Skip.