Idaho

By Jalen Andrew

It was late June as we crossed the Montana border and started our descent over Idaho. Bellow, sage, and scrub brush shape the valleys into jade inkblots running between sand-stained peaks slashed with occasional seams pale of shadowed snow. The ridges eventually gave way to a patchwork of green farmland as we banked sharply towards the city and finally touched down among the shimmering heat waves of the Boise tarmac.

It had begun over the winter. My aunt and uncle, who were just beginning their married lives on a sprawling plot of ranchland in western Idaho, had promised me and my brother food, housing, and airfare for some extra help around the farm. We of course said yes, and after waiting for Idaho's notoriously late spring thaw and convincing two friends to come along, we packed boots, clothes, and sunhats and caught a flight to Boise.

As we sat on the curb outside the terminal, the 90-degree air that the pilot had promised felt light and breezy — far from the heavy inescapable humidity of the summers I’d grown up in. When my aunt pulled up, we piled into her old Camry station wagon and were soon speeding North on Highway 55 towards our home for the next month on the outskirts of a small lake town named McCall.

Two and a half hours later, we’re leading a plume of dust down an old farm-to-market road, past a lone mailbox, and onto a rutted overgrown field access track. Cramped and carsick, we spill out of the car along with our bags and take in our new home. Surrounded by ponderosa and hemlock, the rocky ground is covered in a blanket of dry auburn needles. On the edge of the clearing sits an ancient clapboard hunting lodge, it's one room just large enough for a small table, a set of drawers, and the remains of a brick wood stove. The walls are far from weatherproof, but the tin roof and raised floor, we’d soon find out, made the lodge the driest place to be when it rained. Sprinkled throughout the rest of the clearing were the tents, four colorful peaks that would be our sleeping quarters for the next month.

It’s a pretty little clearing, smelling of alpine spring and dappled in patches of late afternoon sun that flit and sway with the branches above. Through the pines, we can just make out the white canvas top of my aunt and uncle's yurt, and after piling our bags in a free corner of the lodge, we start down the connecting trail. It’s about a half-mile walk from our campground to the yurt which takes us through a field housing a pack of inquisitive donkeys, across an irrigation brook, and up a slope covered in bottlebrush and bluegrass. The yurt is a sturdy circular tent built of canvas and wood atop a circular deck, twenty feet across and with a slanting roof that peaks into a little circular skylight. My aunt and uncle had been living in it since building it a couple of summers past, and the inside is a cozy jumble of wood furniture, copper cookware, and cloth hangings. A big swinging glass jug filled from the nearby greenhouse spigot and a couple of solar lamps are used in place of electricity and running water. We’re all a worn-out mix of travel-weary excitement, and after dinner, we agree to meet my uncle at the toolshed at dawn the next morning and head back through the darkening trees for an early night.

Our alarms go off together in an early mourning cacophony of warbles and chimes. Bleary-eyed and shivering from the frost, we unzip tent flaps, pull on boots and hoodies, grab a few granola bars, and head for the toolshed. When we arrive, my uncle, already a veteran of early morning work, is there to greet us with fencing staples, mallets, rebar stakes, and a strange-looking ratchet tool he calls a wire stretcher. We load into the little white Daihatsu pickup, a Japanese-made minitruck used for getting around the farm, and putter down the driveway and up a dirt track to the top of a field.

Below us, my uncle points out a lazily drifting herd of grazing cows and explains that he’s leasing the land to a neighboring cattle farmer. Our job is to shore up the fences after a winter of heavy snow and fallen branches. After showing us how to use the wire stretcher to tighten drooping portions of barbed wire and how to drive in new stakes to prop up the old rotted-out posts, my uncle leaves to feed the animals, and we hoist our tools and start down the slope. The work goes fast once we get the hang of it, and by noon we’re nearly through the first field. After lunch, we spend most of the remaining daylight weeding and trimming runners in the acre-wide vegetable patch, and by sundown, everyone's hot, dusty, and tired as we take turns under the greenhouse shower.

Another early morning. Today we don work gloves and unload at the top of another field, this one full of knee-high wheat and barley growing to be cut, bailed and packed away for winter hay. Unlocking a small pumphouse, my uncle turns a valve and the sparkling spouts of water arching over the field wilt and disappear, taking their droplet rainbows with them. If we run them early, before it gets too hot, we’ll lose less water to evaporation my uncle explains as we tramp through the dripping hay towards the first snaking line of sprinklers.

The task seems a relatively simple process of dismantling, moving, and reassembling the series of sectioned sprinkler lines at outlets further down the field. But, after two hours of hauling the slippery 40-foot segments through the hay, all we have to show are aching arms and one meager field of meandering silver lines, sprinkler heads jutting up at a dozen mismatched angles. And thus began my hatred of solid-set sprinkler systems, something I hadn’t even known existed until that morning.

Huddled in my sleeping bag that night, forearms feeling like they'd lost a fight with a meat tenderizer, I listened to the wind in the pines and wondered how in the hell I’d be able to do that again tomorrow.

As the sun rose again over the hayfields, so did my resentment towards the sprinklers. It had only been a half-hour and I was already bordering on exhaustion. I’d tried carrying the pipes without gloves, but that only made them more slippery. I’d tried hugging the sections to my chest, but the sprinkler heads always spun down and caught in the grass. I’d tried putting in earbuds, but even the Pixies couldn't revive my half-dead forearms. Finally, I gave up on lifting altogether and resorted to dragging each section dejectedly into place.

Somehow we managed to get through the week, starting each day with the dreaded sprinklers. We split into teams of two, and each tackled a line. Every morning in the hayfields feels like an eternity, a Sisyphean task we’re doomed to repeat but never improve. Then, after our arms and spirits are thoroughly defeated, we move on to fencing, herding, or garden work until dinner.

By the weekend we’re exhausted, but having the day off, decide to take out the old farm bikes and try to find the cliffs we’d heard were nearby. We follow the road between rusty wire-trimmed cow fields, towards McCall, and into the foothills along the lake. Each hill we crest lays before us the unfortunate view of yet another hill, but after a couple of hours, we finally come upon the cliffs. The highest one is maybe forty feet, but looking down on the flat dark waters of Payette Lake, it seems much higher. When I finally build up the nerve to jump, the drop feels like it goes on for much too long before plunging me into the frigid waters, but the fleeting weightlessness is exhilarating and soon I’m scrambling back up the rocks to do it again. Later, as we sprawl out to dry on rock slabs overlooking the cliffs, the afternoon sun flaming the clouds and ripples in the lake looks almost too pretty to be real, like something off the cover of a Kodaline album.

The weekend’s gone in a flash, and as we get back into the farm routine the sprinklers only get worse. Instead of building strength, we build calluses which almost immediately split and make moving the pipes even more painful. The frost-slick aluminum is constantly slipping through our numb fingers and the reverberating thuds, as they hit the muddy ground, ring through the fields accompanied by muttered curses. But the summer swelters on and so do we, working in the fields by day, playing cards or Catan by lamplight if we have any energy left at sundown.

The fourth of July comes in the middle of a long hot week. My aunt packs sandwiches and while the sun sinks towards the gold-tinted mountains, we tramp through the pasture to a big boulder standing stark against the rippling hay. As the evening dims and the temperature drops, bursts of blue, silver, red, and gold begin breaking above the skyline followed by the deep crackling booms of McCall’s lakeside firework show. It's a beautiful sight, and our little rock island amongst the grass holds the warmth of the sun long after it’s gone behind the mountains.

The second weekend in July brings with it McCall’s monthly market, and so we spend most of Friday picking tomatoes, pulling carrots, and cutting lettuce to be washed and stored overnight in the root cellar.

Saturday morning dawns bright and hot with everyone up early to help pack yesterday's harvest into the truck. My aunt and uncle leave for Market Plaza, a parking lot overlooking Payate Mariana, and the rest of us decide to hike nearby Boulder Mountain. The trail starts in a half loop that skirts the edge of a vast reservoir. The pale trunks of aspens lie half-submerged on the bank, and under the wind-rippled surface, you can see trout flitting through the shadows. As the path begins to climb, it meanders through a fern-blanketed pine forest, occasionally interrupted by sloping gray boulder fields. Near the top, we emerge from the trees and cut across steep granite slabs worn smooth by millions of years of alpine erosion to finally reach Boulder Lake.

Over a mile above sea level and fresh from snowmelt, the water is breathtakingly cold but feels amazing after the long hike. There's still a long way to go to the summit, and the sun's already sinking towards the treetops, so we decide to call it a day and sit watching the mountain chipmunks scurry across the rocks for a while before heading back down the trail.

Finally, after two weeks of waking to the dreaded daily moving of the sprinklers, the third brings hope as the last week before harvest and bailing of the hay. We’ve all built up just enough strength to move separate lines on our own — finding the middle of each section and hoisting it like a tightrope walker's pole before carefully tramping the fifty feet down the field to the next outlet. It’s still exhausting, but we’re getting it done faster and have more time in the afternoons to work on easier tasks like de-rocking the potato plot, stringing up temporary grazing pastures, and hauling around an endless supply of cattle minerals to the endless supply of suspicious cows.

Our last full week on the farm comes too fast. We’re now well in the midst of fire season and a half-contained wildfire on some distant mountainside renders a hazy backdrop for life around the farm. The hay has been cut and baled and one morning we take out the old flatbed and, as my uncle drives it slowly through the field, we hoist and stack the bales on the back. Once they’re heaped up high enough to start wobbling precariously, we drive slowly back to pack them into the shed. As our shadows swing steadily eastward, the fields empty and the shed fills past the rafters. By sundown, we’ve packed away enough hay to feed the farm through the approaching winter.

We spent our last weekend in rented kayaks exploring a tributary off Payette Lake. The currents dwindle to an idle crawl where the river meets the lake and we paddle easily upstream, gliding over barely submerged rocks and the warped reflections of overhanging ponderosa. We pull our kayaks onto a pebble-strewn beach for sandwiches and find a deep spring-fed swimming hole carved deep into the river bend. It’s a beautiful spot, and the rhythmic splashes and laughter of others paddling on the lake carry upstream to mix with the muted gurgling of distant rapids.

The next day, as we bump down the now familiar farm-to-market road trailing our forever faithful plume of dust and bound for the airport, I watch as our little campsite, and then the yurt, and finally the entire farm shrinks and disappears in the grimy rearview. The month we spent in the fields and surrounding foothills that had, in the midst of the ten-hour workdays often felt endless, now feel as if they’d gone by much too quickly. The low points, the homesickness, the loathing of solid set sprinklers, now all feel small and insignificant set against the good times, the beautiful landscape, and the adventure of it all.