Chapter Two
In 1975, with only six gates, Boise Airport met the definition of a sleepy little airport. I first saw it from Shepherd on a road trip to visit Rick’s adoptive mother. Luey Noble lived in a small house on five irrigated acres less than a mile from the airport. Rick’s sister and brother-in-law, Mollie and Don Culley, lived on the property with Dennis, their eight-year-old son. They kept horses, dogs, cats, birds, chickens, and a cow on the small farm. They cared for the animals in the morning before they left for their jobs in town, then they came home and tended them again at night. The Culleys weren’t the only family to work multiple jobs while struggling to hold on to their property and way of life against encroaching development. For the Culleys and others it would be a losing battle. Open spaces and five-acre farms near Boise Airport have since given way to subdivisions, industrial parks, and massive structures with enough parking spaces to accommodate all the passengers who now use that airport, which, as I write this, has at least thirty-two gates and can no longer be considered “sleepy.”
At first, when Don and Mollie said they were going to do chores, I assumed they meant washing dishes, making the bed, and sweeping the kitchen. Wanting to be a considerate guest, I offered to help. That’s when I learned that on a farm “chores” meant getting up at 4 o’clock on a winter morning and slogging to the barn through slush, mud, and manure to feed the animals, milk the cow, and gather eggs. As a guest, my participation in chores was voluntary. For my hosts it was mandatory. A few years later, when I was responsible for the twice-daily care and feeding of farm animals, I would learn the meaning of “mandatory.” I would find it extremely challenging to leave my warm, cozy bed to go up to the barn in temperatures as low as 45 below zero, but I would also find caring for those animals grounding and rewarding.
Living in Idaho and visiting Los Angeles seemed a much better idea than the reverse. I could continue my professional career no matter where I lived. Even so, though I wrote and released a number of albums after I moved to Idaho, the perception in the industry was that I had dropped out. I suppose that if you measure a person’s standing in the music business by her position on the charts or her presence at star-studded parties, I did drop out. But I felt as if I were dropping in to real life—or as real as life can be when you have financial security beyond the reach of most of your neighbors.
Rick and I began the search for our dream place by driving northeast along the Boise River on Highway 21 toward Idaho City. The first property we looked at was about a half hour out of Boise in the highlands above Mores Creek, a tributary of the Boise River. The two brothers who owned the property could have been anywhere from forty to seventy-five. Each wore denim overalls that might have been blue at one time but had evolved to a nondescript slate color. They lived together in a one-room cabin roughly twice the size of a hot-dog stand. A table covered with bills, envelopes, and other papers stood beneath a wall covered with girlie calendars from the 1940s. Unwashed dishes filled the sink, and there were black grease stains everywhere. The cabin reminded me of the back office of a filling station I’d walked through in rural Connecticut when I was a teenager.
To make conversation, I asked if either of them were married.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” one of the brothers drawled. “We find it’s cheaper to rent ’em.”
When Rick asked if we could view the property, the brother who had answered the “married” question led us out the back door to an old crew-cab pickup that would hold all four of us. Rick sat in the passenger seat. The other brother climbed in back with me. As we bumped along the two ruts that served as a road, Rick asked about water.
“Are there any hot or cold springs?”
The brother who had answered the “married” question replied, “Yep.” Evidently he was the more gregarious of the two.
We waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, Rick and I exchanged a look in the mirror as if to say, What do we have to do to get information out of these guys?
The gregarious brother stopped the pickup, pointed to a stand of red willows, and said, “Ya got a cold spring right there.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“Ma’am? D’ya see them willas?”
“Yes.”
“Wa-al,” he said, “where ya got willas, ya got water.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound as if I had already known that.
“Ya see,” he said. And he stopped as if that were his complete thought. Then, with the extra patience shown to a city slicker by a man raised in the country, he added, “That’s how it works.”
He shifted into first and started driving again. The taciturn brother decided it was time to end the discussion.
“No water, no willas.”
I had just received my first lesson in the lore of the land from a couple of locals. Other valuable lessons would come later, including that sewage flows downhill, payday’s on Friday, and the weather in Idaho changes every five minutes. In fact, right after “Idaho is what America was,” the phrase I would hear most often in my adopted state was, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.”
The brothers’ land wasn’t suitable for our purposes, and neither were several other properties we viewed along Mores Creek. We wouldn’t find our dream place for nearly two years, but in the intervening months we had an unexpected encounter that led to an extraordinary evening in New York with a man who had changed the world.