Finding My Way

Draft 3.0... close to being done  
(What used to be the large chapter called "Where's My Hat?" has now been broken up into three chapters... this is now the first chapter of the Thing. People of superior intellect convinced me it works better this way.)

 

When people ask me if I’m an Idaho native, I tell them, "No, I came to this state with my pants on."

What they’re really asking, politely, is How did someone like you get to host and guide Outdoor Idaho, the intermountain West’s longest running and most awarded outdoor show? And what’s been the formula for success for almost four decades?

I sometimes ask myself that, too.

So, where to begin.

 

Traveling with my family in the far back seat of a green American-made station wagon, with a duckling won at a school fair, I arrived in Boise in 1960 with my mom and dad and two brothers. My dad's job in the finance business meant a promotion out west, and I was along for the ride. I was ten and fresh off a 5^th grade U.S. geography test, where my only mistake was the misspelling of Idaho’s capital city. Some might have taken that as an omen. I just know that for this young North Dakota transplant, the misspelling was more humiliating than not being an Idaho native. 

 

I guess my story is not so different from all the others who have recently poured into the state, except maybe for the duck part. Like most Midwesterners, I knew next to nothing about this strangely configured state. And what I did know turned out to be wrong. Idaho is not the “Tick Fever State,” as one bumper sticker proclaimed. Idaho's crazy border with Montana was not the result of drunken surveyors, and “Idaho” is not an Indian word for “Gem of the Mountains.”

 

What hooked me is what has hooked so many others: the Sawtooths. I still remember coming around the bend on Highway 21 near Stanley for the first time. Suddenly my world got a whole lot bigger.

The hook was set when I was 12, during a fifty-mile hike sponsored by the city of Boise, with men and pack horses, and a dozen kids I didn’t know.  After that, personal trips with high school buddies to lakes like Alice and Imogene, Toxaway and Edith pretty much ended any connection I might have had with the state of my birth.

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Growing up Catholic, I studied the Bible, but there was another bible that fascinated me at least as much. “Mountain Lakes of Idaho,” published by the state’s Fish & Game Department, featured 20 pages of lakes found in various mountain ranges, complete with trails and descriptions about fishing, with easy-to-understand words like “excellent,” “good,” and “poor.”

I still have that 1965 dog-eared pamphlet, and I pull it out when I want to reminisce about how sweet life was back then. My folks would drop us off somewhere along that menacing expanse of towering Sawtooth peaks. After promising to meet them later in the week, we would begin our trek into the “promised land.”  

 

It took me years to stop seeing Idaho as merely a series of lakes and mountain ranges, with the Sawtooth Mountains the fairest of them all. Idaho was the perfect place for this young inexperienced “mountain man.” Deserts and canyonlands would just have to wait til I was ready. 

 

The Sawtooths had an official name that made things even sweeter. The Idaho Primitive Area had no roads, no motorized vehicles, no permanent buildings. But it did have lots of hiking and camping and chances for teenage adventures. We didn’t realize it at the time, but a decade later that "Primitive Area" would become the "Sawtooth Wilderness," and part of the newly created Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

We took our fishing seriously in the Primitive Area, and made sure we always carried butter and salt, along with oatmeal, rice, dried fruit, and chocolate bars. Our ace in the hole was a small container of worms, sure to impress the large fish our bible promised us. I suspect the prophet Isaiah would have approved of our slavish devotion to God’s creation.

Highschool friend Larry Reilly had travelled from Portland to join our trips into the Sawtooths. "I can see why those mountains made such an impression on Bruce. They are majestic and scary and safe, all at the same time. They certainly were a big part of our growing up process. Idaho is lucky to have mountains like that."

 

I wince when I think of our camp manners: the waste of brook trout that we caught and never ate; the haphazard way we dealt with waste of all kinds; our unconcern for how we piled rocks to contain our white boys’ campfires. There was no excuse, but we were 15 and we were the only ones around the lakes. 

Except for a wizened old miner, who seemed to enjoy bad-mouthing the U.S. Forest Service. We were pretty sure he didn’t know what he was talking about. Every ranger we had met was friendly and helpful.

 

But he did lend us rope so we could build a raft to float out to the island in Toxaway Lake, where we promptly carved our initials in trees. He also assisted us in devising a devious prank.

Toxaway Lake is a seven mile uphill hike, starting at Petit Lake, one of the Sawtooth lakes one can drive to. Our buddy Brad wouldn’t be starting up the trail until much later. That meant the three of us teens had plenty of time to scheme.

And scheme we did. One of us had an extra pair of jeans. We stuffed it full of grass and twigs and hooked tennis shoes to the end of the jeans.

The miner lent us more rope, which we wrapped through the belt loops of the jeans. Our plan was simple enough. We had noticed a small creek running alongside the trail.  After a hearty meal of brook trout seared in butter and garlic and salt, we headed back down the trail toward Petit Lake.

We found the perfect tree, one with an overhanging branch. We soon managed to toss the rope over it.  With a bit of practice, we could get the jeans to swing across the trail, at about eye level.

 

Each of the team had a task that evening. As our hapless friend Brad was struggling up the trail in the light of the full moon to be with his good friends, he would hear in the distance the bloodthirsty howl of a wolf.

That would set his mind racing. The next sound would be the hard splash of something in the creek behind him. We pictured him spinning around in abject fear, expecting the wolf attack at any moment.

As he turned back toward the lake to hightail it to where his worried friends would be waiting, the other member of the team would release the rope, and the dead man’s legs would swing across the trail, brushing poor Brad’s face.

 

Now all we had to do was wait for our victim to arrive.  We congratulated ourselves, and wondered how loud his scream would be, and whether he would live long enough to forgive us.

It was after midnight when we decided Brad would not be coming up the trail that night, that he was sleeping in his car down by Petit Lake.

We took one last look at the specter of the half-man swinging in the shadows, and figured maybe it was best that Brad had camped at the trailhead. The ghostly presence of the dead man in the moonlight was even frightening to us.

 

The next morning, we had all but forgotten the previous night’s shenanigans. We were too busy trying to fix a meal that didn’t involve brook trout. It was then we noticed an official-looking man on horseback riding into camp. He and his horse had run into something back on the trail. He wondered if we knew anything about it. We played dumb, which for us was not hard to do.

 

After taking a good long look at each of us, the man and his horse proceeded up the trail toward the next lake basin. We couldn’t tell if that snort we heard was from him or his horse.

 

About ten in the morning, Brad arrived at camp. He didn’t look right. Said he was walking up the trail with his head down, and out of the corner of his eye he spotted something lying slightly off the trail. He said he almost died of fright.

We tried to keep a straight face and had even promised ourselves that we would keep it a secret, at least for a few hours. But we were teenagers, so that was never gonna happen. 

 

But eventually he did forgive us. Later that day, after we had caught our fill of brook trout, we decided to climb the tallest mountain at the far end of the lake. There were places along the climb when each of us needed assistance. There is nothing like a tough climb to forge a tight knit group, regardless how asinine we had been the night before. From our perch we counted 22 mountain lakes and one highway. It was my first major climb, and I quickly learned what experienced climbers tell novices: climbing up is optional, but coming down is mandatory... and usually much harder.

I had never seen so many lakes. I could make out the route of that 50 mile hike. The Sawtooths were revealing themselves to me. There was a logic to the landscape that I never would have grasped without that climb to 10,000 feet.

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I’ll be the first to admit that my resume was downright sad. I had attended high school at Mt. Angel Seminary, where I studied to be a Catholic priest and where I had developed a knack for writing.

How did I get there? It turned out that the Benedictine nun who taught 7^th grade at Sacred Heart School in Boise got the assignment the next year to teach 8^th grade. It was a bit strange, but we just figured they were running out of nuns.

What that meant is that she had two years to instill in me a belief that I was someone special, that I had what she called a “Vocation,” and that the next obvious step was the Catholic Seminary, located on a hilltop outside the little town of Mt. Angel, Oregon. To this day some of us still speak of Sister Mary Barracuda.

 

At Mt. Angel Seminary my high school teachers were Benedictine monks. Everyone on that hilltop wore long black robes, including me.  Life was incredibly structured. You knew where you’d be every hour of the day. The first bell rang at 6:00 a.m.; the second bell ten minutes later. You better have your bed made and be heading to study hall by 6:25. Then a walk to the monastery crypt for religious services at 7:00 a.m. A half-hour later, the 150 of us headed to the breakfast hall located in a nearby brick building.

 

We each were assigned a weekly stint waiting on the others, and you were considered a good waiter if you could round up extra Wheat Chex or Cheerios for your assigned tables. The rubbery pancakes made by the seldom-seen nuns were a special treat, and an exceptional waiter was the one who could track down uneaten pancakes and deliver them to the hungry teenagers at your tables. After breakfast we all cherished the half-hour of "free time" before the first class at 9:00 a.m.

 

My freshman class was the largest ever: 65 students. It was the era of Pope John the 23^rd, and there was a feeling that “change” was on the horizon for the Catholic Church. The size of our class proved it.

 

However, one of the things that changed almost daily in my world was the number of students in our class. Sometimes a student would leave between evening study hall and breakfast, with nary a good-bye. Apparently, having a “vocation” in a monastery of monks, with no girls on campus and no mom and dad nearby was not what some teenagers had signed up for. By senior year in high school, our original class had dwindled to twenty five students.

 

The classes themselves were rigorous and fairly classic. My favorites were English and Speech and Debate. I’m sure I landed in the 99^th percentile in punctuation,  thanks to Father Ignatius of the Order of the Benedictines. My debate partner and I always did well in the Speech and Debate tournaments held at various high schools around Portland, Oregon.

I also won First Place in “After Dinner Speaking” for the entire state of Oregon. My speech consisted of making fun of my seminary training.

 

I figured all this gave me a leg up in the writing category. But in Television, the melding of words and interviews with video involved a whole different set of skills.

However, I had another ace. I had spent a summer as a college intern for a Republican whose district included Eugene and Medford, Oregon. Think Sun Valley and Challis. I can only guess that the Political Science Department at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, was not fond of Congressman John Dellenback, and so chose me as an intern.

 

Washington, D.C., was an alien place to me, but one with magnificent museums, exotic sandwiches, and secret tunnels and passageways throughout the Capitol. I'm a slow learner, but it took me only two days of perspiration-soaked white shirts by 9 a.m. in the morning to devise a simple plan for shutting down the government. Simply derail the air-conditioning system. 

 

But it was what I did after graduating from the University of Oregon that seemed to matter. I had spent a few weeks in a tent outside the mountain town of Idaho City, the self-proclaimed “Ghost Town That Refused to Die.” I was on my way to Whitefish, Montana, to visit my older brother for several weeks. He owned property bordering the Bob Marshall wilderness. The day I had planned to leave, I wandered into O’Leary’s Saloon. The bartender just happened to be an architecture student from the U of O. We got to talking, and that’s when he informed me he was heading back to school in a few days. He said that Pat O’Leary would be looking for a new bartender. He introduced me to Mr. O’Leary, we shook hands, and I was hired.  Pat told me I’d pick up the necessary skills soon enough.

 

But not quite soon enough. A ‘ditch’ was the primary drink of many of the ‘locals.’ It’s a simple mix of bourbon and water. Thinking that the City Marshall deserved better, I ran a lemon slice around the lip of his glass and dropped in a red cherry. One of the locals, Jerry Lansing, was sitting next to the Marshall at the bar. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Reichert, you’re not going to last 2 weeks.”

That’s when I knew Idaho City was where I belonged.