I met a girl named Becky at the Cha Cha Lounge two nights ago and more or less became instantly enamored. She was from Challis, Idaho, and we talked until the bar closed and she and her two friends had to leave. I may never see Becky again, which is why I have written this memoir:
I just Google Mapsed Challis, Idaho. It’s somewhat close to a town called Chilly, Idaho. It’s a small town place built upon the hearts and minds of upstanding Americans. Real, hard-working Americans like you and me. People we can identify with. People we can believe in. It has a baseball field where every Easter the 4-H club holds their Easter egg hunts. Do you remember last year when little Billy Ripkin got lost in the rose thicket looking for the golden egg? Oh, how he cried and cried. He must’ve cried for three hours until someone finally shut him up with an icecream sandwich.
And then there’s Becky. The light of my life. A smile that could bring the strongest, toughest man to his knees. The kind of smile that can only come from a small town like Challis, Idaho, where it can’t be corrupted, tarnished and stained by the big city. Growing up, Becky wanted nothing more than to get out of Challis and see the world. She wanted to be a city girl. Her parents prayed that it was just a phase — who would milk Goerta after she was gone, what with Tommy working 12+ hour days at the meat processing plant?–but when she talked to her daddy about going to the big city he know deep in his heart that it wasn’t just a phase. He saw the glimmer in her eyes, a glimmer he had only seen once before — when he asked his wife Evelyn to marry him.
Becky finally made it to the big city. From Challis it was a 13-hour drive, up into Montana through Missoula then into Washington through Spokane on I-90. Her daddy brought her because he knew it might be the last time he saw his little girl for a while. That smile, so full of life. Those eyes. He knew she was fated to leave Challis when she got her tattoos. That was the first sign, the biggest sign. Sure, people in Challis got tattoos — people got them all the time — but not tattoos like this. On her right wrist she had a few words from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Man is the cruelest animal.” On her right abdomen she bore the Arabic transcription for the word, “Rain” and on her left bicep a small angel which she had seen in a digital reproduction of the sistine chapel during her junior year art class. These tattoos told her daddy she would not last long in Challis, but the presentiment did not make it sting any less when he finally dropped her off in Seattle and turned the car back around for Idaho.
Now Becky is doing just fine. She hasn’t forgotten about Challis, Idaho, but a little part forgets every day. She doesn’t notice the things she forgets. One week her brain stopped remembering what it used to smell like on her parents porch when the spring thunderstorms would roll in over the Sawtooths from the west. The next week it was the name of the street of the pool where she used to take swimming lessons as a child. By the time she went back for Christmas, the first winter after she had left, she barely remembered how to milk Goerta. Worst still, she didn’t want to milk Goerta.
Who’s to say whether life is better in the big city or in the wide-open country? To each man, or in this case woman, her own. Becky might have forgotten how to milk the heifer whose milk helped her grow from a little girl into a strong woman, put part of her, somewhere deep inside, will always long for Challis. Her daddy is waiting for the day when it happens. He knows part of her longs to roam free, longs for a freedom that can’t be found in the congestion and crowds of the city. He knows her life was not meant to be centered around sewer grates and honking horns, but rather the whisp of the fall wind in the wheat and the fresh patter of a summer drizzle, when it seems God himself is willing the corn to grow higher and higher. The tattoos did not change Becky; the city cannnot change her either. Just as every spring the storms come in from the West, from north of Ketchum and into the Salmon River Valley, one day Becky will come from the west too. She will come home, and she will stay. Because she has not forgotten her daddy. She has not forgotten her soul.