“A Sense of Place” writing prompt from Tony Evans’s writing class -Summer Solstice 2007

One Rich Pilgrimage over Dollarhide Summit

It’s the perfect distance from town. A destination place to go and see the forest for the trees. I’m just sitting here watching the trees breeze by; I really love to watch them turn. The cell phone sinks around where that Cottonwood is that must be on plant steroids or something. Tony himself wrote about it, saying how a beaver probably chomped on it for practice –to keep its teeth up to snuff.

First June here, I got the bug to get up thar. ‘Straight to the top’ –as Tom Waits sang some drunken Frank Sinatra. Rolled up a bend with radio id on full blast and found hundreds of trees had brokeback down the avalanche. Shoot. Never made it up there that first year.

But made it up most years since.

Last summer went camping in Dollarhide’s sparse foothills. I didn’t even have to drive, just rode shotgun daydreaming up peace-frogs, R.C. Colas and moonpies - stuff like Jim Morrison used to, as Steve piloted the windy warshboard road to our pinnacle.

The sign said altitude 8715. Fifteen feet higher than Galena Summit. Only a foul shot taller, but the road stays closed in foul territory til June -Junebug. Every summer some eccentric cousin gets Spring fever, tries to shake off their winter Brrrrhs, drives up there and high- grounds in the northside path snow. Best to pack a spare spare and that full ambulance of stuff those cowboys always require for their wild ways.

There’s an old mining claim up there, where somebody probably went broke, just like me, destined for poverty, sending a short sad morse code back to ma. Yet strangely some days, things simple and nice, simply happen, And we’ll notice them if we meditate close enough; a kind word, a genuine smile, a connected eye contact enough so much that I begin to feel like the richest man in Sun Valley now and again.

I find myself daydreaming about Dollarhide Summit for hours sometimes. More time invested daydreaming than I have actually spent there in reality.

The cell phone works very sketchily from the top. Etch-a-sketch Morris code. May have to make several calls to get yr mssg across. This July One I was going to call her. The girl I had been seeing. I looked up at the sky and the sign there said, it was not a good time. Storm clouds were gathering too. The year was perfectly split in two.

Didn’t call her back, til we returned from our camp trip. Then called four times, never heard back. I guess we were playing softball that summer. Four strikes and you’re out. Later when I ran into her, she mentioned that her investment house down by the Fairfield crossroads had been lightning struck that stormy first of July. Baked half her house. No ‘surance either. I said, “You never told me your house was struck by lightning."

That day July 1, kept crawling in my craw. I felt there was something significant there, but couldn’t pinpoint it. Weeks later, I discovered my Grandmother’s recent passing notice. I was reminded that my Grandfather had passed from this earth on July 1, in Pennsylvania, exactly twenty-seven years before.

~ ~ ~

Last week, I went to a birthday party for Maddie Mackenzie. You may have seen him traipsing around town with the large toy dog he carries and talks with. Even though he has Down’s syndrome, he is a savant level curly impersonator. Soitenly Idaho’s greatest Stooge impersonator. In some ways, Matthew and I are much alike with our level balancing challenges. Mathew was turning 27. For a gift, I gave him three stooges CDs –mostly with Curly’s imbedded -naturally.

He responded by saying, "I really love you, Jimmy" as I placed my arm around his shoulder in the living room, right before the special occasion dinner.

After we expressed our thankfulness, for this opportunity for us all to congregate, we partook of Mary's sumptious servings. Soon the occasion formed into a ceremonious opportunity for us to hand Maddie his remaining gifts.

Maddie’s brother Joe, gave him a radio controlled Dukes of Hazard Racecar. It makes perfect horse sense that someone made a kind remark about Daisy, saying he wished she could have popped out of the cake for the party. On the package of the racecar, it was splashed in large lettering 27 MHZ. Seeing this made my heart run like the General Lee. I reminded everybody that it was Maddie’s 27^th birthday. As they inserted the dozen batteries, and honked General Lee’s horn, I wondered if on some level the 27-splashed number subliminally attracted Maddie’s brother into buying the toy.

After all “Real Job in MHZ” is an anagram for my name, “Jim Banholzer”

Later, I found out that as I got to the top of this Smoky Mountain, that there is an even higher hill .

to conquer

Isn’t there always?

Tim Quietly Conquers Idaho

Tim Quietly Conquers Idaho

Reminisces of an amazing bicycling savant

In 1998, Tim visited me here in Idaho to triumph over some great mountains. This was the same summer that Roger Maris’s fabled home run record was finally surpassed. Days after work, friends begin asking; “How many homers did Sosa and McGwire slug out over the fence, and what high mountain peak or ultra-marathon feat did Tim accomplish today?”

This was Tim’s third visit to Idaho. We had been close friends since 1969, when in fourth grade we used to construct elaborate mazes for each other in Mrs. Adams’s class. Tim was probably the quietest boy there. We were both shy on our outsides and would regressively mirror our quietude into each other, with these evermore-challenging paper traps -trying so hard to stump one another. Though we were mostly silent boys, our constant Tom-Sawyer-foolery, did not make us the apples of Mrs. Adam’s eye. When I wrote about this before, in a memoir called “Solid Oak View Memories”, which ended up published on our alumni website, Tim strongly defended himself, by saying that other children back then also partook of the Huck-Finn-Foolery and were constructing elaborate mazes during instructional periods.

It only occurred to me later, that Tim was defending himself, because, now in his forties, he still lived with his mother and that when she got wind of this newest paper trap, that she might still say, “Tim what was it that you and Jim meant to do by constructing small baffling mazes in class?” Especially now that Tim had struggled at Virginia Tech, withdrawing from school there the year after his fathers agonizing defeat by cancer.

Upon Tim’s non-victorious return from college, it was easy to see the burden manifest in his pinkish face -and now with his dad not around for emotional and financial support. Out of our high school group, Tim and I were the only stragglers left, apparently destined to scrabble through life with a series of underpaid janitorial and maintenance man jobs.

And I with my own far-fetched emotional trauma recovery plan from Plutonian, Idaho.

Perhaps we became closer friends through default. Nonetheless, our friendship grew and besides often working together, we begin training for elaborate athletic events. Together we would construct intricate bike routes traveling through the hilly labyrinths of Virginia suburbia, often bicycling in fifty-mile neighborhood loops all the way down to George Washington’s Home at Mount Vernon. Tim would usually draft me, letting the pull of my wind drag him along, as back then I was the stronger rider, probably from all those basketball years.

When I first moved to Idaho, It was another big blow to Tim as he had two wonderful sisters, but no brother and now I- his brother from another mother was essentially gone. When he came out here, we essentially jumped back to where we had left off with our friendship. Allowing little time for altitude adjustment Tim started pumping up hills his first week out here. Evidently, after I left Virginia, the bicycling hobby we enjoyed together grew into an all-consuming passion for Tim. He would take weekend trips; in one-day ride all the way from Boston to Rhode Island, and back alongside busy highways –unless of course for his magical mystery tour, he could predetermine some elaborate backdoor blue-jay-way labyrinth for doodling through.

He looked good too. Healthier than I had ever seen him. This bicycling Zen of his had even allowed him to break whatever barrier it was that was locking in his shyness and people discovered that once you scratched the surface with Tim that he was filled with unlimited intelligence and richly humorous insights.

Compared to conditions back east, chugging up the 44 miles to Galena Summit from Hailey was a cakewalk for Tim, with its elements of good road surface, steady grade and sparse traffic.

The second week of his trip, he decided to go for broke and do the fabled Dollarhide Summit loop on an old mountain bike. Exactly, what some people might consider ninety-eight miles of agony was something Tim embraced. The bike he rode didn’t even have shocks. He started out from Hailey around ten. I was hoisting rocks with Gene Olson for some chimneys in Lane Ranch and told Tim that I would drive out Warm Springs around seven –until I could find him.

Tim had gone straight out Croy Canyon, over Richardson Summit and that back ways towards Fairfield. Unfamiliar with the area, he became temporarily bewildered, but soon figured out the answer to the maze with his oversized map. He took the correct turn at that inviting sign below Soldier that says “Ketchum 55 miles”.

A sign that every spring some Fairfield cowboy gets his dander up and tries to romanticizingly wahoo over the pass; only to get quagmired in mud, and then has to wander unprepared, back to town, with blister boots and tail between legs. Then call Dick York and with a ticked off gaze, ride shotgun in the retrieval tow truck never establishing eye contact with the fellow travelors in the area, who all know he’s the durn fool that tipped it this year.

Tim pedaled steadily. He startled an occasional fox or superquiet rabbit into the sagebrush. While chugging up that long rocky dirt grade, he passed some sparse campers. Being the middle of the week and not yet hunting season, there weren’t many folks around yet. He noticed the ninety-foot tall Indian face chiseled in stone by mother nature, which guards over one of Idaho’s perpetually best hot springs, but even though nobody was soaking today he didn’t take time to temporarily sooth his legs.

Tim had bigger fish to fry than what Warswick Hot Springs could provide.

The steeper grade leading to Dollarhide summit remained to rise over as Tim continued pumping and grinding furiously to defeat everything that stood in his path. As he weighed up the hill, he wrestled with bumpy ‘warshboards’ and rocks that could throw you, which twinged his arms to sleep with their constant pounding. Dust filled the chain rings, but the little two hundred-dollar bike held up amazingly with only one flat.

Tim flew like Steve Miller's eagle past Carrietown, a ghost town I had been haunted by enough to write about.

He made it to the summit around 5:30. To loosen up he took a few victory hops. Later on, I took a photograph of him standing there with his bike and believe that this depiction deserves placement on a pedestal next to a shimmering waterfall birdbath.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

At 7:30 I came around Frenchman’s bend, discovering Tim halfway between there and Rook’s Creek. His arms were sore, he was a mite dusty and the headlamp burned out from the rattling bumps. But he was in high spirits. I duct taped a fresh flashlight to his handlebars and insisted -nay forced him to sip a cool Budweiser for 'loosening up'. He started to speak about the trip and some of its tedium, but insisted that he would try to complete the full loop. I went back to Baldy View Apts., where in darkness, around ten o’clock -exactly twelve hours after he had begun, Tim, in his oft-silent manner, returned victoriously from his mighty Herculean effort.