Chapter Ten
With Rick gone, the financial arrangement at Welcome Home caused some of the more responsible members of the community to announce their plans to move elsewhere. I, too, thought about moving elsewhere, but I didn’t know where. All I knew was that I wanted to stay in Idaho and I didn’t want to live in a city. I considered the idea of a place even farther from civilization that would be small enough for me to handle on my own, but inertia kept me from taking action.
During my time in Idaho I’d come to believe that it was mandatory for everyone to drive an old pickup and own a Labrador retriever. Toward the end of August, when a friend of one of the women living at Welcome Home drove down for a visit, her arrival in a pickup with a black Lab in the passenger seat did nothing to disprove that theory. On her way out, the visitor, whose name was Joyce, stopped by the double-wide and invited me to come up and visit her the following weekend.
Seeing Levi and Molly, she said, “Bring the kids. They’ll love it.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Burgdorf,” she replied. “About thirty miles northeast of McCall.”
“Bergdorf?” I repeated, mentally visualizing the name the way a woman from New York would spell it. “There’s a Bergdorf Goodman near McCall, Idaho?”
Joyce burst out laughing.
“No, Carole. It’s not a store. It’s a little town with cabins around a hot spring. Come on up. You’ll see.”
Joyce was still chuckling as she climbed into her truck and drove up the hill.
Burgdorf was an unincorporated little town where a community had been established in the latter half of the nineteenth century around a natural hot spring in a magnificent mountain meadow. In 1978 the town comprised roughly twelve cabins of varying sizes and shapes. The cabins had seen better days, and the largest building, once a hotel, had fallen into disrepair. The town was owned by a brother and sister who lived, respectively, in McCall and Boise. Scott and Gretchen Harris allowed members of the public to stay in the cabins for a minimal charge. They didn’t need to advertise. Word of mouth brought campers, hikers, and families in the summer, hunters in the fall, and cross-country skiers and snowmobilers in the winter. Virtually no one came in the spring because Warren Wagon Road was too bare in some places to snowmobile or ski, and too deeply covered with snowdrifts in other places to drive.
Over the years the Harrises had hired serial caretakers to live on the premises year-round and collect rent for the cabins on behalf of the owners. The price of an overnight stay that year ranged from five to ten dollars, depending on a cabin’s size and condition. There was no maid service, room service, electricity, telephone, or plumbing in any of the cabins. If you wanted drinking water you could either bring your own or haul it from a seasonal spigot in a nearby Forest Service campground. An unheated outhouse up the hill from each cabin served as a toilet. Heat was provided by a cast iron heat stove and a cookstove in each cabin fueled by wood from a well-stocked woodshed. There was no bedding. You slept in your own sleeping bag either on a pad on the floor or on top of a bare mattress covered with mouse droppings that you’d have to brush off before you put your pad on the bed. Some of the cabins had a loft accessible by a removable ladder.
Molly, Levi, and I drove up the Friday of Labor Day weekend. Joyce, who was that year’s caretaker, showed us to our cabin. Molly and Levi would sleep in the loft. I would spend the night on a bed that I zealously cleared of mouse droppings before I unrolled my pad and put my sleeping bag on it. It surely was not Bergdorf Goodman.
Hot water was abundant on the property. Natural hot springs underground fed two small pools under a roof supported by four poles and three walls. At approximately 130°F, the water in the covered pools was too hot for human beings, but the effluent from those pools fed a much larger pool under the open sky. At 115 degrees, that pool was the main attraction for visitors. At first contact the large pool felt too hot. Everyone made the same series of sounds upon entering. First they said, “Ooh! Oh! Ow!” Then came the inevitable “Ahhhhhhh” as the person relaxed into the heat of the water. Everything that had seemed so important a few seconds earlier had just moved to a back burner. Such was the magic of Burgdorf.
It wasn’t like Baden-Baden, a spa town where rich Europeans went to “take the waters” in Germany’s Black Forest and enjoy fine wine, excellent cuisine, and luxury hotels. Burgdorf was rustic, simple, and wonderful. For a mere five dollars, which I gave to Joyce over her protests, my kids and I got to spend the night in a warm cabin and enjoy a soak in a large natural hot springs pool under the stars, which, as I recall, were spectacularly clear and brilliant in a moonless sky that weekend.