A conversation in text:

"... tell me about your time in Moscow.... and Pocatello... Idaho is a fairly eccentric place if you hang out there for any length of time... hitched through there many times in my youthful travels..."

I went to graduate school in Moscow. What else is there to say about it? *laugh* It's a small town in the pacific northwest--one of two liberal pockets in Idaho. The Sun Valley area being the other. The campus there must be one of the most beautiful I've ever seen. They have an arboretum in which grows every kind of tree that will survive in that climate. Everywhere one looks, ever changing fields morph from the rich umber of early spring, to verdant fuzz by early summer, finishing off the season as waving fields of gold that appear much the same as sand dunes. The wind draws esoteric patterns through wheat nearly as tall as me. The campus was built in the late 1800's where green everywhere frames dark, velvet red brick buildings. Some of the buildings sport gargoyles. There are cows with surgically implanted windows in their stomaches through which agriculture students can watch the animals' digestive processes. Huge shade trees and the scent of roses out maneuver the exhaust of vehicles along Main Street. Bucolic some might say.

Pocatello hunkers down from the wind and heat of the desert. Dry, barren, nestled between the two abandoned banks of the prehistoric Portneuf river. Geologic abnormalities abound, Red Hill rises just off the edge of the campus and no one knows where it came from or why it's there. Head and fist sized sapphires and rubies lay hidden, teasing young geology students. The river still flows with gold and with rainbow trout. One of the worlds largest underground aquifers sits under the dry dessert surrounding the dingy city.

Idaho claims me. I was born in the south west corner of the state, drawing my first breath from the Parma Desert. As a child, I watched sturgeon the size of my school bus swim up the Snake River. I braided alpine daisies and started fires with dried moss, woven grasses and my glasses in mountains cut through by the river of no return. I swam naked in the rivers and lakes of Idaho. I bathed in a natural hot spring cut out of the side of a mountain with the arctic South Fork of the Salmon river rushing by inches from my pool of sulfurous water. I rode the rapids with nothing but a life vest, meeting each swell feet first. I am a part of Idaho--my bones created from the minerals and nutrients abundant in that green and growing place. I am also 'not' Idaho--other geologies and geographies also feed my wandering body and growing soul.