He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. opined George Orwell

Chapter Two    

At Home in Idaho City
Draft 4.9.4
April 2, 2026  (finis, supposedly)

 

I could tell no one quite knew what to make of my Greek fisherman’s cap.

It was the 1970s, and the town stood on a cultural fault line: loggers and miners on one side, long-haired back-to-the-landers on the other. I don’t think either group was eager to claim a bartender wearing a black wool cap better suited to the Mediterranean than the Boise Basin.

That was fine with me. A good bartender occupies the middle ground.

I poured drinks for the old guard at O’Leary’s Saloon while keeping one foot in the Miners’ Exchange Saloon, where some of Boise’s best garage bands, like Famous Potatoes, held court. O’Leary’s had “Big John,” who had no shortage of country tunes until the night he keeled over mid-set. I never learned what exactly it was that toppled Big John. I just knew it was the end of his musical career at O’Leary’s.

My girlfriend Jenny Laper liked to remind me that when we first met, I told her I had come to Idaho City to write the Great American Novel. Certainly not the smoothest of pick-up lines. But I have always believed in talking myself into things. And I was certain the old mining town held enough raw material for at least a trilogy.

Tending bar at O’Leary’s, I began to appreciate the authenticity of people who weren’t especially interested in adjusting to Idaho’s increasingly urban tilt. One of my favorite people was placer miner Hank Bertram.

Hank showed up weekly at the saloon with a tiny vial of gold dust, eager to display it to any woman who showed even mild interest. It was his opening line. He liked to pass the vial around to the ladies, but one evening it didn’t return. I’m not sure he ever got over that someone was mean enough to do that to him.

One afternoon Jenny and I visited Hank at his one-room cabin along Little Muddy Creek, which flows into Grimes Creek. It was near there that George Grimes and his party struck gold in August 1862, igniting one of the West’s great rushes and jump-starting the state of Idaho. Not far from Hank’s place was the spot where Grimes was murdered, some say by a group of Shoshones. Many in Idaho City figured it was more likely that his mining buddies killed him for his share of the gold. 

Within a year of moving to town, I was writing my first article for the fledgling Idaho Heritage Magazine. It was as much an introduction for me to the Boise Basin as for the few hundred readers who might see it. Hank agreed to an interview, sweetening the deal with homemade raccoon stew—on the condition that we talk creekside.

 

The stew was sweeter than I preferred, but I cleaned my bowl and accepted seconds at his insistence. I snapped a photograph of Hank in front of his cabin. It ran in the magazine, though I doubt many saw it until I gave a copy to Trudy Jackson. She framed it and hung it in her “World Famous Trudy’s Kitchen,” where it remained for more than forty years—a miner immortalized in a place better known for its delicious pies.

Driving back to town, Jenny reflected on Hank’s theology. Her father had been a minister, and she appreciated Hank’s summary of his former calling. “I used to be a religious fanatic,” he told us. “But there’s no future in it.”

 

Another regular was Earl Bream, who worked diggings above town. Earl looked mean enough to stop a fight before it started—bald head, thick build, black patch over one eye; but in truth he was a gentle soul.

One Sunday afternoon my parents stopped by O’Leary’s, likely to assess how thoroughly I was squandering my college education. They had my young nephew Wes with them. I thought it would be sociable to introduce him to the locals. Earl ambled over and bent down to eye level with the five-year-old. “I’ve got an eye out for you,” he growled. Wes did what most sensible people would do. He burst into tears. To this day, he’s steered clear of Idaho City bars.

On weekends, it seemed half of Boise made the forty-mile pilgrimage up Highway 21. In those days you could walk from bar to bar with a drink in hand. It was the kind of town that treated rules as suggestions.

 

One busy night, someone hurled a chair through the stained-glass window my friend Kenn Smith and I had built for Pat O’Leary. The window spelled SALOON in Irish colors. It was meant to be read from inside. Tourists staring up from the street saw “NOOLAS.” We didn’t care. We were appealing to the locals. The others were what I learned to call “flatlanders.”
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I began building my cabin above Idaho City in my second year in the Basin. My plan was to use materials I gathered myself.

As a kid, I’d spent hours with a set of Lincoln Logs. The cabin logs were always horizontal. I wanted something different: vertical logs, a structure that felt like it grew straight out of the hillside.

I also wanted to heat the entire place with a single wood stove, to keep both my plants and my pipes alive through winters that regularly dropped to twenty below. The plants did fine. The pipes did not. It took one frozen winter—and a complete replumbing—to teach me how fast water in copper can turn to ice.

Over the years, I’ve thought of the cabin as my child, requiring more work over the next decade than any rowdy teenager. I guess the upside is that my cabin is still a place of comfort and solace, long after its teenage years. And it’s almost finished!

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In high school I read Our Town and dreamed of acting in it someday. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning play described “the record of a tiny New Hampshire village as created by the lives of its most humble inhabitants.” Idaho City had humble inhabitants in abundance. It also had characters.

What if we gathered some of them during the long winter, handed them scripts, and asked them to become Grover’s Corners?

With two seasoned theater veterans in town—Ed Lonsdale and Barbara McClain— who were willing to co-direct, we ordered scripts and began reading lines in my cabin. The visqueen had finally been replaced with stained glass, but as someone noted, it was still as cold as a well-driller’s anatomy.

Reading the play was meant to fight cabin fever and nothing more. But by the time snowdrifts crippled traffic and blocked the light in my bay windows, we were starting to warm to the idea of an April 1 performance. The date felt right.

“We moved rehearsals to the drafty Masonic Hall, stacking tables for a stage, crowding into narrow hallways as makeshift wings,” remembers Barbara McClain. “Bruce was always our bandleader for fun things. He was the part-time librarian at the Boise Basin Public Library and got the idea to have the library loan us seed money. He convinced the library board that we’d pay the money back with the ten-dollar tickets we’d charge for admission to the play.”

And the library did receive its money back, with interest. From then on, the little library became the civic bank and cultural engine for the town.  It helped fund the town’s annual Arts & Crafts Festival, attracting artists from throughout the state. The summer weekend event continued for more than 20 years before it became a chore for all involved. I think half the town was relieved.

The library also underwrote the entirely fictional Idaho City University. ICU, as we called it, specialized less in academics than in raising money and spirits. Jake Hoffman and I served as “Administrative Assistants to the President,” whose identity was conveniently unknown.

At our inaugural event, historian Dick d’Easum praised our official seal and its Latin motto: “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi.” Always wear underwear. The learned Mr. d’Easum was chosen because he had written books on Idaho history, including Sawtooth Tales and Fragments of Villainy. We figured he’d fit right in to the spirit of the event, and he did.

Dick spoke glowingly of ICU to the hundred people crammed into the bar, where the big concern was whether the dance floor would hold the crowd. Dick declared ICU worthy of being part of Idaho’s university system, even superior to some institutions because it made no pretense about itself and took no money from the public coffers.

The dress code was Idaho City black tie—tuxedos with caulk boots, sequined gowns with fur hats. By the time we held ICU Prom Night, half the town considered itself faculty. For twenty dollars, you could receive a calligraphed diploma. Mine still hangs in the bathroom.

Not all of our humor landed. After one ill-timed speech poking fun at the State Board of Education, we discovered too late that several attendees worked for the Board. Jake and I made a hurried trip to Boise to apologize. The director wasn’t in, so we apologized to his secretary and drove back to the mountains, chastened but intact.

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On opening night of “Our Town,” the hall was packed. The old Masonic Temple—built in 1865—was perfect for the occasion: wood stove, gas lights, wooden benches, even frogs croaking in the nearby pond. It felt less like a set than a continuation of the play. Our town was coming to life in “Our Town.”

Everyone who wanted a role had gotten one. Mine was Doc Gibbs, one of the main characters in the 3-act play. Boise attorney Byron Johnson also played a role. This soon-to-be Idaho Supreme Court justice didn’t have any lines, but his job was an important one. During intermission between the second and third acts, Byron headed down to the town’s bars to retrieve Randy. Randy was the town drunk in the third act. He didn’t have a speaking part, but no one questioned his credentials. 

My girlfriend Jenny played Emily. The play’s high point arrives in the third act, when young Emily dies and goes to the afterlife.  Not used to being dead, Emily is anxious to return to her old life. The other dead spirits warn her, but she insists.

Soon, however, she realizes that the living are too caught up in self-centeredness and trivial matters. They don’t notice the beauty of their ordinary lives. Her excitement turns to disillusionment. She hurries back to her body’s resting place, with the realization that our time on earth is an irreplaceable gift, one to be relished every moment.  

And through her tears Emily utters some poignant lines: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?” The answer comes back quietly from the play’s onstage narrator: “No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”

The play is a real tear-jerker. Through a slit in the curtain I saw men who had faced down wildfires and bar fights quietly wipe their eyes. It was that kind of night.

“It was a spectacular endeavor,” said co-director Barbara. “Everyone in town attended and raved. Of course, some may have been unduly influenced by the heavily spiked punch provided for free by Mayor John Brogan and his good friend Bud McDonald. And the cast party afterwards—what I do remember of it—lasted for several days. At least it seemed like it to me.”  

The next week’s major headline in The Idaho World proclaimed the play a huge success. Perhaps it was a bit self-serving, but as editor of the oldest continuing newspaper in the state, I thought it entirely appropriate. We had experienced something that few rural towns ever will.

The reporter from the state's largest newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, agreed and gave it a positive review.  Even a reporter from urban Boise could feel what was happening in that small room.

Afterward, Mayor John Brogan presented me with the key to Idaho City: a twenty-inch wooden key that opened absolutely nothing. It still hangs on my mantle.

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The Pioneer Cemetery a mile outside town reminds visitors that Idaho City has always lived close to the bone. Cholera, gunfights, mining accidents, drunken brawls—few early residents died gently. On one headstone are the words Dum Tacet Clamat. Though silent, he speaks.

After Our Town, we chose to mount a melodrama to capture another side of town: The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch. It was proof that high art and low comedy could share the same drafty stage. “Our Town” had won a Pulitzer Prize. There were no awards for “Sneaky Fitch.” It was the flipside of "Our Town."

In the little town of Gopher Gulch, Sneak Fitch was the obnoxious town drunk. No one sheds tears when he falls ill and supposedly dies because of suspicious medicine. But when Sneaky rises from the dead, the townsfolk are frightened, and Sneaky quickly becomes the sheriff, the mayor, and town banker. In other words, he’s insufferable.

After Doc Burch returns from his trip and explains to the town’s citizens that Sneaky was never really dead, it’s curtains for the town drunk. The play is humorous, with a happy ending, a real crowd pleaser.  

I had invited the famous columnist from the Idaho Statesman, Tim Woodward, to the performance.  My friend drove up from Boise to experience "culture" in one of his favorite towns. I was a bit surprised seeing him in the audience, and I was even more surprised when he devoted his next column to an evening spent with Sneaky Fitch. 

"The thing that made it special, to my way of thinking, was the town spirit that went into it," wrote Tim. "Roughly a fourth of Idaho City was involved, in the cast or behind the scenes, and the other three-fourths was in the audience. It wasn't Broadway, but it was contagious. Whatever might have been lacking in professional expertise was made up in enthusiasm and community pride."

Tim attended the Saturday night's festivities, when afterwards everyone is introduced on stage, especially those behind the scenes. The directors and the set designer and others received flowers. No one was getting paid, so flowers seemed appropriate.

"I'll be hanged with Sneaky's rope if there weren't tears in the crowd as well as on the stage," Tim wrote in his column. "It was something to see, a whole town pulling together like that. You can always travel to see 'sophisticated' productions, but the other part is hard to come by. I've never enjoyed a play more."

He was right. Seems what we were building in Idaho City wasn’t just theater or a joke university with diplomas and ICU sweatshirts. We were learning how to affect a community, how to tell stories together, how to frame a moment so that people might see themselves in it.

And I was learning skills that were quietly preparing me for a very different stage.

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(for another chapter, not chapter 2) below:

 

Open Mic... a place where others offer their opinions about Outdoor Idaho. Letters have been/will be sent out to a large swath of folks across the state. They will be asked to give their honest opinions about what the show got right or wrong, its impact on the state, on them personally. The comments will be compiled in some way or other into a chapter that makes some sense. Will it work? Can't rightly say.