Hours of Daylight – 13:22

The weather is shifting rapidly. Daytime highs are still reaching into the 90’s, but the evenings are dropping into the low 50’s here in the valley. The secret is to open all the windows at night and vent the heat of the day. Then as the next day’s temps begin to climb close all the windows and keep the coolness inside the house as long as possible. This keeps the A/C off for most of the day. Sitting here, in my "office" with all the windows open, i find it hard to imagine more beautiful weather. The only thing lacking from where i’m sitting this moment is the sound of the Pacific crashing against seaweed-covered rocks below. That would be it… that would be my ideal.

We visited Pine and Featherville this past weekend. It was a "spur of the moment" trip in the ongoing spirit of trying to learn as much as we can about this place. Not necessarily the history per se, but we are trying to get a sense of what’s where. We’ve taken to simply keeping the van stocked and ready for a rapid departure.

We opted to camp at the Dog Creek NFS campground. People, mostly with self-contained rigs, camp all over the place in the National Forests surrounding Boise, but we prefer designated campgrounds. First, we don’t have a self-contained rig, and the idea of pooping in the woods basically a stone’s throw from your neighbor just doesn’t do it for me. As i child i hated outhouses… but now i like them just fine. You need to take care of them, but if you’re good to them, they’ll be good to you. While i’m on the subject i need to mention Fred, the campground host of Dog Creek. For many years now State and National parks have taken to installing "hosts" in the campgrounds. Mostly these are retired folks who stay in the parks a fixed number of nights, keep an eye on the place, sell firewood now and then, and sometimes do light maintenance tasks. I’m unsure what the official duties of the CG Host are, but Fred of Dog Creek is best example of a CG host i’ve yet seen. He loaned us a grill, loaned us an axe, loaned us a chair and gave us some charcoal and a firestarter block. When he wasn’t loaning us stuff he was hauling sand and gravel to fill in soft spots on the access road, or telling us about the history of the place, or describing how he had to start prepping the picnic tables for their annual coat of paint, or asking how the vault toilets were (he’d recently painted the floors and was getting ready to cut-in the edges of the floor and wall.

When he asked me "how was it in there?" as i emerged from the toilet building the first thing that came to my mind was that great line from "Full Metal Jacket" where the sargeant tells Mathew Modine to get that head so spic and span "the virgin mary herself would be proud to take a dump."

"Just fine, Fred. Thanks."

So, the towns of Pine and Featherville can be called towns by only the loosest definition of the word. I missed the post offices, but i’m guessing Nitz’s general store in Pine, or the Featherville Saloon could be doing double duty. I don’t mean to be disparaging at all. I have no use for rural towns that pretend to be more than they are. It’s just a bit upsetting that there’s really no “town” to walk to. Featherville has a cafe and a motel, but it too is pretty loosely described as a town.

However we did take the excellent forest service road up as far as Rocky Bar, the first true “Idaho Ghost Town” we’d yet visited. We discovered most of the “town” is for sale. But, more importantly, while wandering up one of the two “town streets” i discovered something that positively tickeled me: hops, growing wild and in great abundance. So, standing there, examining the hops, listening to the rush of one of the two streams, thinking of that “For Sale” sign, i formed a plan: instead of opening a B&B on the coast of Oregon, i’d open a B&B&B in Rocky Bar, Idaho! A Bed & Breakfast & Brewpub! I would make the beer from the local hops, the local stream water, and import the barely malt from somewhere in the state (somebody has to grow six-row barley *somewhere* in Idaho). It would be the Rocky Bar Bar!

Surely nobody has ever had this thought before, right? Right??

My greatest talent is in coming up with ways to spend millions of dollars. Pity my ability to make millions of dollars is not as well-developed.