Caldwell, ID
As I mentioned yesterday, Jay was chatting with our neighbor, Nick, in the RV park. I didn’t mention that Nick had a Traeger smoker (like Jay’s big one) out behind his RV. Naturally, the guys got started talking about smoking, and Nick mentioned that they had gotten some great chicken at the market in Hagerman and smoked it. Jay had his small Traeger in the back of the pickup, but we had forgotten to bring chips. Not a problem, Nick would be glad to give us some. So we went to the market, got chicken, salads, and a 12 pack of cold Corona to give Nick. Skip came out to the park and despite the heat, we had a lovely dinner at our shaded picnic table in a pleasant breeze. Skip remembered when the couple who still own the RV park built it 25 years ago and planted all of the saplings that now make the park a shady oasis.
Hagerman is a tiny town of just over 800 people, but it’s full of pleasant surprises. It has a real town center with a very nice market, a history museum, a fossil museum, at least two quite nice restaurants, and several pieces of fine public art. It’s strange how different towns of similar sizes can be. Hartwick, at 2,000 has none of the above, and gets by with a single gas station/mini mart, a post office, fire station, three churches and one restaurant. And the closest it comes to public art is a few baskets of flowers at the main intersection. But Hagerman serves a large area, and Hartwick is part of the large area served by Cooperstown and Oneonta. So it’s all relative.
We took Skip to breakfast, saw the trailer he is rebuilding, and said goodbye, sorry to leave his company. We were a pleasant two hour ride to his older brother, Ronald, in Caldwell. Caldwell is a mostly new town of 50,000, close enough to Boise for a commute. After a lot of empty space in most of Idaho we’ve driven through, the Boise area is densely populated. Of course, by Bay Area standards there’s still a lot of open space, and housing is relatively low cost. But by the standards of most of Idaho, this is urban sprawl. Ronald and family live in a very pleasant, large, newish house. It looks like a fine place for his great grandkids to grow up, but in contrast to Hagerman, which has so much character, it could be a newish suburb anywhere.
But we’re here for the company, not the culture. We had a nice visit with Ronald and his daughters, Jay’s nieces Marilyn and Connie. Connie has Downs, and at 60 has far outlived her expected lifespan. She recently had a tough bout of pneumonia, but has recovered well. As Jay is quite a bit younger than his half-sibs, he’s closer in age to his nieces and nephews. Jay’s Mom had five sons and a daughter with her first husband, and then had Jay seven years after Nancy, the youngest until he arrived. We haven’t spent much time with Jay’s family, so this is a treat for me, to see him with his brothers and hear them tell stories of childhood and young adulthood. It’s a hardworking clan. Ronald and Skip both spent time in the demanding dairy business and some time driving trucks. Now in their eighties, you can see both the resilience that hard work gave them and the physical toll it took.
Dinner tonight with Ronald and Marilyn, and then as early a start as we can manage tomorrow. We have our longest driving day of the trip ahead of us, heading back north and east into Montana to see Nancy. We’ve had two short driving days, so we’re well rested, and there really wasn’t a good alternative. We’ll get to Nancy in the evening and we’ll spend two nights there.