Home Again

I'm back in Texas after a week in Boise. I made this trip to the Northwest mostly to celebrate my dad's 82nd birthday with my family, but I did some work while I was there as well--I met with a class of really wonderful students at Boise State University on Thursday and did a reading at BSU on Friday evening. I taught at the university for a few years in the mid-90's, and it was good to have a chance to reconnect with some of the people I knew back then.

I still call Boise my hometown, but I have a troubled relationship with the place. Partly, I think, this is because I lived in Boise mostly as a kid--so I go back to feeling like a kid every time I return, feeling trapped and discontent and vaguely furious all the time, exactly like a teenager. There's no reason for me to feel this way now, of course, but it's like an emotional reflex I can't prevent. I lived in Boise for only three years as an adult, those three years I taught at BSU.

This time, though, staying with my sister instead of in the house where I grew up, it was easier to be in Boise and still feel like myself. Just having my own car to drive seemed to make a huge difference. When I'm there with my own little family, my husband usually drives; it had never even occurred to me that being a passenger in a car in my hometown contributed to that feeling of being dropped back into childhood again. Just having some small measure of autonomy this time let me be in Boise and still feel like the generally well-adjusted adult I've been for more than twenty years now.

When I talked with my friend Karen's nonfiction writing class at BSU, one of the things we discussed is what constitutes an Idaho story. Does it have to include hunting and fishing, for instance? Part of my own Idaho story is having grown up as a non-hunter in a family of hunters, and becoming a vegetarian as the result of that. (Though I gave up vegetarianism when I moved to Texas, a.k.a. The Land of Meat.) Another part of my Idaho story is the class division I faced because I never learned how to ski. By the time I was in high school, all my friends had been skiing since they could walk; even if I'd had the money to buy or rent equipment and go skiing on the weekends, I wouldn't have been able to keep up with them. Whole layers of the social hierarchy in my high school just weren't accessible to me for that reason alone.

In my first novel, part of what makes it an Idaho story for me is one character's feeling of being trapped by the landscape of her life. The Boise where I grew up was very remote--it's not within easy driving distance of a major city, and in any case my family didn't travel for recreation. We drove to a campground, or we drove to a relative's house in the Midwest; it wouldn't have occurred to my parents that we might just go visit a city for the sake of seeing what it had to offer us. I always wanted to live somewhere other than Boise, because it seemed like Real Life must be happening somewhere else. I always wrote stories about people who lived elsewhere: Seattle, New Orleans, Chicago, Paris, all manner of places I knew absolutely nothing about. I had no idea how I'd manage to go to any of those places on my own, but I was intent on getting away.

When I drove across the country to start graduate school, I remember being shocked by how much space there was between Idaho and Kansas. Somehow, the "away" I'd imagined wasn't quite as far away as reality took me. I wound up in a strange state, in a strange town, on a strange campus with (it must be said) a strange roommate. But that's where I learned to see Boise as a place in its own right, a place with a very specific personality and character--a place worth writing about. When I left Idaho, for the first time I met people who were fascinated by the idea of a place they'd rarely even heard of. As my friend Steph puts it, "Before I met you, people from China were more real to me than people from Idaho."

These days, when I go back to Boise, it doesn't look a thing like the town I remember. It's much larger than the place where I grew up, much more urban, much more hip. And, truth be told, San Antonio feels like home now. I'm glad to be back.

But Boise is a place I love. Most importantly, Boise is a place.