“The Roundabout Way”   (Chapter 1) (newly changed) 

 

When strangers ask if I’m an Idaho native, I sometimes tell them, “No, I came to this state with my pants on.” And while they’re trying to figure out what I just said, I prepare for what is often their next question: how did someone like you end up hosting the Intermountain West’s longest running and most decorated outdoor television program? And how does a series like Outdoor Idaho last for forty years when everyone at the station assumed it would fold after four?

Few people know this, but Outdoor Idaho began in 1983 as a co-production of the Idaho Fish & Game Department and Idaho Public Television. Fish & Game had stories to tell, with a nationwide reputation they were proud of. They wanted hunters and anglers to see where their license fees were going. Besides, they already had a glossy four-color magazine. Why not a TV show as well.

Idaho Public Television, the scrappy statewide PBS network, already aired Nature, Nova, and This Old House. They were on the hunt for something new, a local TV show with a built-in audience of hunters and anglers. And they certainly were not going to turn down the $25,000 that F&G was willing to pay them for the use of a TV cameraman and editing equipment.

One agency had Big Bird, the other had a hunting season on big birds. Not exactly a marriage made in heaven. Still, on paper it made a certain sense.

I arrived in Idaho wedged in the back seat of a green American-made station wagon and clutching a small duck I’d recently won at a school fair. My mom and dad and my two brothers were making our way to Boise, Idaho from Minot, North Dakota, where I was fresh off a fifth-grade geography test in which my only mistake was misspelling Idaho’s state capital. At the time, it felt more humiliating and concerning to me than moving to a state where I was not a local.

This is my story about the roundabout way I became the host of Outdoor Idaho and what that has meant to Idaho Public Television, me, and—dare I say it—the state of Idaho.

Like so many who have since poured into Idaho—duck aside—I knew almost nothing about the place I was going to live, and what I thought I knew was wrong. Idaho was not the “Tick Fever State,” bumper sticker notwithstanding. Its ragged border with Montana was not the result of drunken surveyors, although I’m sure they drank; it had more to do with raw politics back in Washington, D.C. And “Idaho” was not an Indian word meaning “Gem of the Mountains,” which is a real shame.

What bound me to Idaho is the same force that hooks everyone who comes here: the raw majesty of the Sawtooth Mountains. I still remember my family driving up Highway 21 toward Stanley on a road that men with heavy machines were preparing for pavement. I was completely unprepared for the moment those jagged peaks shattered the horizon. Instantly, my world exploded with new possibilities. I swallowed the hook deep. There would be no catch and release for me.

The next year the city of Boise sponsored a youth hike into the Sawtooths with pack horses, adult leaders, and my buddy from 7^th grade, Greg Brown. His dad and my dad thought I should accompany his son on the 50-mile hike into the rugged central Idaho mountains. A dozen other boys I didn’t know rounded out the group.

After that memorable initiation into Idaho, Other Sawtooth trips with high-school friends quickly severed whatever thread still tied me to the prairie lands of Minot, North Dakota.

Growing up Catholic, I studied the Bible. But truth be told, I was captivated by another bible almost as much: Mountain Lakes of Idaho, a 20-page Idaho Fish and Game pamphlet cataloging lakes across the state, complete with trails and fishing forecasts: “excellent,” “good,” “poor.” I still have that dog-eared 1965 copy. When I open it, I can almost feel the weight of a canvas pack on my shoulders.

My parents would drop us off somewhere along that intimidating sweep of granite peaks. “See you in five days,” they would say. With oatmeal, rice, dried fruit, chocolate bars—and always butter and salt for the trout we knew we’d catch—we headed into what felt like the Promised Land.

It took me years before I saw Idaho as more than a series of lakes and mountain ranges, with the Sawtooths the fairest of them all. Deserts and canyons would just have to wait until I was ready.

Back then parts of the Sawtooth range carried the phrase “Idaho Primitive Area.” No roads. No motors. No permanent buildings. Just lakes, trails, and wondrous possibilities. A decade later it would become the Sawtooth Wilderness, centerpiece of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. But to us it was already sacred ground. We didn’t know it at the time, but the SNRA would break new political and social ground. It would also become the scene of some of our most beloved Outdoor Idaho programs for nearly 40 years.

We knew nothing about all that. Our minds were focused on the fish to be caught.. Our secret weapon was a small white styrofoam container of worms, sure to impress the large fish our bible promised us. I suspect the prophet Isaiah might have approved of our slavish devotion to God’s creation, if not our methods.

On one of our trips we hiked to Toxaway Lake and for a week lived primarily on brook trout and freeze-dried pork chops. We built a raft and paddled to the lake’s island. We also climbed to the top of the 10,500-foot peak at the far end of the lake, where we counted 20 lakes from the summit. I could trace part of the route of the 50-mile hike two years earlier. Idaho was starting to make sense to me.

If the mountains were shaping my heart, another path was teaching me about discipline. I attended high school at Mt. Angel Seminary in Oregon, intending to become a Catholic priest. A Benedictine nun at Sacred Heart School in Boise—I later referred to her as Sister Mary Barracuda—had convinced me that I had what she called a “vocation.” Soon I was living on a hilltop among monks, where everyone, including me, dressed in long black robes.

A typical day at Mt. Angel seminary began with a wake-up bell at 6:00 a.m. The second bell at 6:05 am. was for stragglers. By 6:30 a.m. we needed to be in study hall, and by 7:00 a.m. we were on our way to morning Mass deep in the monastery crypt. A walk to breakfast commenced at 7:45 a.m. in another building where we passed a sign that said “He knows the faith.” Except it was in Latin: Fidem Scit.

Breakfast time meant we could break the silence. A bevy of Benedictine nuns prepared the meals. Pancakes were my favorite: a rubbery texture that the Pancake House has yet to duplicate. We each took turns waiting on our classmates, a week at a time. An excellent waiter would be the one who could bring his table extra pancakes and Rice Chex. If you pulled that off, you were definitely one of the cool kids on the hilltop.

A full schedule of classes started at 8:30 a.m. with a noon break for lunch, followed by more classes until Sports at 4:00 p.m. Sports for us took place on a large grassy field below the monastery. Everyone played the sport of the day: soccer one day, then tag football, then track and field. The high school had a full-sized basketball court that also served as a meeting place for special events, which usually meant speeches from Catholic dignitaries. Occasionally, the Mt. Angel Saints would play a local team in basketball. It was a fool-proof way to re-learn the virtue of humility.

Half an hour of free time, then dinner and study hall and prayer until bedtime in one of several large dormitories. No Johnny Carson for us. There was no worry about falling out of bed. The shape of the mattresses resembled tiny bathtubs. Still, we slept the sleep of the blessed.

Things weren’t always so strict, however. Sometimes on the weekend, we’d have what were called Days of Recollection. It was a time to meditate about the Good Book and the persecution of the early Church saints and how Hell was a place to avoid at all costs. We all assumed Purgatory was in our future, but at least there was hope for the good life once we had washed or burned away our transgressions.

That’s a lot for a high-school boy to think about, especially in a school where no girls were present. Luckily, we could entertain ourselves by trying to get our heads around God as the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Each year a full-week retreat broke up the seminary routine. Some of us never quite knew what to make of the retreats. It always meant prayers upon prayers, but sometimes we’d get a fire and brimstone speech from one of the priests from Portland, Oregon.

My friend Larry and I were planning a return to the Sawtooths long after high school, when he reminded me why he had left the seminary after only two years. I had assumed he just didn’t have what it takes. But, no, what changed his mind was one of those dramatic fire and brimstone lectures that sent him over the edge, delivered by a young priest from Portland who pontificated on the evils of self-pleasure. “At the time, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about,” said Larry, “but I left soon after that.”

Structure in high school was much more than a recommendation. It was a way of life. My freshman class numbered sixty-five. It was the largest class ever, during the optimistic era of Pope John XXIII, when change in the Church seemed imminent. However, by senior year, only twenty-five of us remained, including me. Many left in the middle of the night. Vocations, it turned out, were easier to declare than to sustain.

The academics were rigorous and classical. English became my refuge. Thanks to Father Ignatius, I could diagram a sentence in my sleep. You would receive Red Rabbits or Blue Bunnies on weekly Vocabularly quizzes; you wanted the rabbits. Speech and Debate were mainstays for a small group of us. Our tiny forensics team was taught by Mr. Bill Austin, brought into the seminary to teach us “logic.” The team punched above its weight limit, toppling the Goliaths around the northwest in oratory, extemporaneous speaking, and debate. We occasionally would hear comments from students in other schools, that it was not fair to have to compete against teenagers whose entire lives consisted of silence and study hall.

In my senior year I actually won First Place in After-Dinner-Speaking for the state of Oregon. My speech consisted of making fun of my seminary life. The audience seemed to enjoy the 10-minute memorized speech, even though I thought they laughed in all the wrong places.

During my first year of college at the seminary, I was politely asked to leave, that I was asking too many silly and pointed questions. College in Eugene, Oregon, was next. One of the highlights was interning for Republican congressman John Dellenback in Washington, D.C. The poor man’s district included Medford and Eugene. That’s like trying to satisfy voters in Sun Valley and Challis. I figured the political science department must have chosen me because they didn’t like the congressman. They wanted to make his life even more difficult.

Washington, D.C., felt foreign to me: humid and humming with ambition. I toured museums, ate exotic sandwiches, and navigated the Capitol’s hidden tunnels. For excitement the congressman’s two sons and I would leap across tall buildings built perilously close in the nearby subdivision where the congressman lived. That’s where I learned not to jump a chasm in two leaps. After two days of summer humidity I devised a foolproof way to shut down the government: sabotage the air conditioning system. By noon surrender would be guaranteed.

But it wasn’t politics that called to me. It was the mountains. On my way to visit my older brother near the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, I camped for a few weeks in a tent outside Idaho City, the self-proclaimed “Ghost Town That Refused to Die,” forty miles north of Boise.

The day I planned to leave, I wandered into O’Leary’s Saloon, wearing a black Greek fisherman’s cap I had picked up while bumming around Europe the winter before. The bartender mentioned he was heading back to architecture school and that Pat O’Leary would soon need a replacement. He introduced me to Pat, a burly Irishman who was hard not to like. We shook hands, and I was hired. Pat assured me I’d pick up the skills along the way. But it didn’t happen soon enough.

A “ditch”—bourbon and water—was the standard drink among locals. Wanting to elevate the experience for the City Marshal who often sat at the bar, I ran a lemon slice around the rim of his glass and popped in a bright red cherry.

A man named Jerry Lansing was sitting next to him on a bar stool. Former boxer, Korean war veteran, and part Native American, Jerry stared at me and my fisherman’s hat and glowered menacingly, “Reichert, you’re not going to last two weeks here.”

Jerry was older than me, and eventually we became great friends. I even officiated at his funeral service. I found Jerry correct about many things, but he was wrong about his prediction that day. I lasted more than two weeks. In truth, I never really left.

I couldn't have known it then, but Idaho City was another turn in the roundabout road that would eventually lead me to Outdoor Idaho. I was learning the state one place and one person at a time—first the Sawtooths, now this rough little mountain town. There were still deserts, rivers, forests and people I knew nothing about. I had no idea that someday my job would be to go looking for them.