Hot Potato

Note the stylish hat.

Idaho is where you learn the difference between a gravel and a dirt road.

This is an old picture but pretty much sums up the last week, during which I have bounced between rural assignments, traveling dusty backcountry roads in places where people move to be far from people.

During these trips I've found many surprises, including the non-correlation between traffic lights and technology: I've found wireless just about everywhere, including two towns with less than 150 people.

I can't say I'm ever thrilled to get back to Boise after a couple days in the mountains but fire season is here, which means more work calls to remote places.

In what can only be described as another terrible assignment in the drudgery that is my job, I was paid to spend all of Monday in the mountains north of Boise to hike around the Payette River and work on a story about a new land development planned for a rural community.

The less sexy part of the job was the four hours I spent in a crowded, stifling senior center room with no air conditioning as developers and town-folk traded unpleasantries. During a break in the action I started chatting with a mustachioed county commissioner who offered me what I thought was a bag of sweets. I was about to take a piece of candy to be polite when I realized that, in fact, he was offering me a bag of chewing tobacco.

Midwesterners will call me a pussy. In fact, I'll pre-emptively call myself one. Yesterday, I made one of the poorer decisions of my life (I know, that's saying something) when I heard there was a tornado warning in a nearby part of the county and decided to drive there to do some storm chasing. It very quickly went from "Awesome," to "Oh, shit."

It's been a strange, rainy spring here in the high desert of southern Idaho - we've already had two reported tornados in a state that averages about a three a year - and it's not even officially summer yet.

The weirdness continued yesterday with unusually humid conditions leading to a weather pattern more like the Midwest or South than the Rockies. A line of severe thunderstorms came crashing into southwest Idaho bringing large hail and at least one funnel cloud. When I heard the storm was going to hit nearby Kuna in about 20 minutes and possibly bring tornados I decided to drive out there to see what I could see.

On the way over I could see sinister clouds with a very clear rotational pattern and lots of lighting. But the rain and winds were light and I still wasn't thinking too much of it. Then I got to Kuna a few minutes ahead of the storm predictions and the rain picked up a little, but still nothing I haven't seen before.

Soon, though, I heard a crash on my roof and I thought a rock had hit my car. Then it sounded like it was raining rocks and I saw sheets of nickel-size hail pounding my hood and windshield. The sky was nearly black, it sounded as though my windshield was going to break from the hail and all the drivers around me suddenly lost their minds, swerving, pulling off the road and generally doing their best to make it even more dangerous to be driving through a potentially tornadic system.

"Hmm," I thought, "I'm a fucking idiot."

So what could I do? I continued driving down the increasingly waterlogged roads praying my windshield would hold and hoping to see the tornado and not be the tornado.

Ten minutes later it was blue skies. No tornado, no broken glass (although the storm did break car windows in the mountains), just some very minor street flooding. And I drove back to the office, knowing my hardy, storm-tested Midwestern relatives would be ashamed I was afraid of a little thunderstorm.

I recently returned from a trip to Portland with the lovely Anna and I'm not entirely sure why I came back. Yes, yes, Boise is a nice town and I like living here but Portland rocks (it didn't hurt that I caught the city during rare sunny and warm weather).

During the trip I fell in love with an exotic cocktail called the pisco sour - a mix of grape brandy, egg whites, lime, bitters and sugar which we sampled at a Peruvian restaurant called Andina during one of the top 5 meals I have ever had.

The highlight, however, was a demonic doughnut shop - kind of DK's evil twin for you Boiseans - called Voodoo Doughnut, whose motto is "The magic is in the hole." Located in a slightly seedy part of town in a decidedly seedy closet of a storefront, Voodoo Doughnut features such delicacies as the tang doughnut (sprinkled with tang powder), the cock and balls (just like it sounds) and the bacon maple bar, which is three strips of bacon on top of a maple bar.

Sadly, I missed out on both the bacon maple bar, as it is only served weekends, and the store's annual Cockfest, where contestants try to stack as many donuts as possible on their wang. Apparently the contest has been mostly theoretical as this was the first year someone actually rose to the challenge (four doughnuts, if you were wondering).