Sandpoint, Idaho–just like Amsterdam minus the Red Light District. Photo courtesy of Big Leap Creative Photos.

A letter from Katie Botkin in Idaho:

I have to say, I haven’t always had the best of luck finding a roommate in North Idaho. Most nice professional single women here tend to want their own place, because they move from someplace like New York and the rent is so much cheaper.

There was one guy a couple of years ago who moved in and then the job he moved for fell through. He moved out promptly. There was one girl who liked to stay up cooking very late, and then accidentally left a pizza burning in the oven all night. She moved out less promptly. Then there was the girl with the super-hippie boyfriend.

This last time, I wrote up a detailed description on Craigslist, describing myself as a light sleeper who disliked drugs and wanted the house kept clean. I got a response more quickly than I’d anticipated. Another guy, but he described himself as employed, quiet and not into drugs either. We exchanged a couple of e-mails. He was fairly articulate and seemed nice enough. So we met up.

At the meeting, I asked him for his references. He wrote down a few names for me. Before I called them, I tried looking him up on the internet. He had a common name, but now I knew what he looked like.

Within one minute, I had found an article from a semi-local newspaper with his photo. As it turned out, he had been arrested for getting in a race-related brawl, and someone had tried to prosecute him for passing out white supremacist literature, which of course they couldn’t legally do.

For a few seconds, I wondered if my usually-inclusive nature should include even white supremacists. And then I decided that because of the color schemes of my friends, that might be a risky decision.

I e-mailed the guy and made up some excuse, not knowing what else to do.

The next guy who contacted me about the room had a long and complex last name. He was originally from Uzbekistan, he said. His father was an atheist Tatar and his mother Russian Orthodox. He was a 31-year-old divorced computer programmer moving up from Eastern Washington. I thought: well, at least he’s sure to not be a white supremacist. I asked him if he’d ever been arrested. “No,” he said. “But I was down in the dumps after I got divorced.”

This one has turned out to be (after more background checks) actually quite an excellent roommate. He works until 11 and then comes home and goes to bed. He washes his one dish every morning. I mean, it’s been all of two weeks, but in that time he has also told me some of the funniest childhood stories I’ve ever heard, in the half-hour between his coming home and going to bed. Last night, he was relating how when he was a kid, they used to shut down the school by breaking a thermometer and tainting the grounds with mercury. Then there would be radiation alerts, and they’d all get sent home. Or else they’d put rotten eggs behind the furnace.

He likes Sandpoint. He says it’s like Amsterdam, minus the Red Light District.

Summer on the lake in Sandpoint, the best little town in Idaho. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Idaho:

On Thursday nights, there’s this phenomenon called dollar beers at Eichardt’s, the local pub and one of my favorite pubs ever. They tap a keg, and everybody gets whatever microbrew it happens to be. Several pints, usually. I often try to limit myself to one, but that doesn’t always happen. Once you’ve been going there for awhile, you can walk in by yourself and find at least one other person you don’t mind talking to for a couple of hours. It’s like church. Actually, some people even call it church. People tend to be very generous when a pitcher costs $4 and they know half the bar. “Put it on my tab,” they’ll say grandly.

A couple of Thursday nights ago, I ran into a team of bicyclers who had stopped in Sandpoint for a rest day. They were biking from the East Coast to the West Coast in support of Multiple Sclerosis. Or its demise, I suppose. The next thing I knew, it was 3 am, and I’d moved on to Jameson and listening to them describe how the trip had restored their faith in humanity.

I kept in touch, tracking their progress to Seattle. I never expected to see them again, but lo and behold, after one day in the city, some of them returned to Sandpoint, driving through the night. This may have had something to do with the fact that they knew a guy who owned a brewing company in Sandpoint, but I like to think that it was because they were telling the truth when they said Sandpoint was the best town they had discovered in their two months of touring, and they wanted another adventure before they had to return to their real lives in Philadelphia.

“It’s amazing,” they said as we ate Mexican food from Joel’s, a delicious and inexpensive lunch stand a block from my house. “Everyone is smiling here.”

Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Idaho:

Perhaps the scariest residents of Northern Idaho are not the cougars, the bears, or the wolves, but some of the people. Many of them live off the grid, up in the hills, where the government won’t be able to find them. I see a few in town from time to time. Even these off-the-grid people seem harmless to me — at least the ones I know. They might sympathize with Randy Weaver, but mostly, they just want to be left alone.

They can be a bit extreme about it, of course, so you do not want to trespass. Which leads me to my favorite story about a North Idaho woman. I didn’t catch her real name, but my friends affectionately christened her Mrs. Rambo.

We had intended to go for a hike on one of the region’s many trails, and rode in a pickup up the pock-marked gravel road to the trailhead. We noticed two things: first, that the trail was blockaded due to grizzly bear sightings. Second, that the trailhead also contained a tent, constructed next to a pickup with faux cowhide seat covers. We pulled out the map and started looking for another trail nearby.

But apparently we were not leaving fast enough, because a largish woman waddled up from the creek where she had been fishing, over to her truck. She pulled out a gun, and fired several warning shots into the air. Then she started yelling that we were on her trailhead. “This is our trailhead,” she emphasized. “We were here first.”

Mr. Rambo had come up from the creek by this time as well and was standing back apologetically. Mrs. Rambo came over to our vehicle, sans weapon, and tried to nudge us back in.

For some reason I was not actually frightened by this situation. Worried, yes, but Mrs. Rambo was so rotund, and so clearly drunk, and her fake cowhide seat covers were so tasteless, that it was hard to take her seriously. My friends were chuckling, which enraged her further. “Go!” she cried, waving her hands in the air.

My friends made a show of folding their map up and we left.

The dead fawn. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Idaho:

Ever since I’ve been little, I’ve watched the Perseids in August. This last weekend, I drove up to my parent’s property out on the edge of the country — quite literally, I’ve walked the six miles to Canada from their house — where there were no city lights, not even a glimmer of them. When it got dark, we spread out blankets over a tarp and looked for shooting stars. My niece, 26 months old, snuggled with her parents until it was time for her to go to sleep. She didn’t want to go inside, and as they carried her, she let out a sob: “Goodnight, stars.”

As I lay out there in the yard, now relatively alone, I started wondering if the cougar was nearby.

A couple of weeks ago, my 18-year-old brother was out for a walk with a girl. They had meandered down to the pond and started up a hill when Isaiah spotted a dead fawn. And then another. And then a doe. And then, out of the corner of his eye amidst this carnage, Isaiah saw the cougar.

The girl let out a scream, turned, and ran. Note: this is not what you are supposed to do when you spot a lethal cat. Isaiah knew this, but he wasn’t going to let this girl go running away alone, like in some bad horror movie. So he ran after her. She fell down. He pulled her up and they kept going. They made it to the house and the cougar had not eaten them.

Cougars are not a rarity out there on the edge of the world. For a couple of summers when I was home from college, I used to go over to a neighbor’s, an older woman who had spent time in France, for pastries and French conversation. I took a shortcut through the woods. My dad made me carry a large handgun, just in case. I thought at the time that it was an ironic situation. Tea in delicate cups and a handgun for the cougars and the bears. Because of course there were bears, too. You didn’t see them so much, just the remnants they left in the apple orchard.

When it was day, several of us set out to see the site of the cougar’s kills. The deer had decayed, half-eaten, mummifying in the sun. We paused over one of the fawns. Poor little thing, it didn’t look very big. My niece stared down at it for awhile and then asked her parents: “I eat it?”

Her parents bit their lips to keep from laughing at her. “No, that’s not for eating,” they said. We walked back up to the house and ate chicken grilled over apple and mesquite wood instead.

Katie in her grandmother’s taffeta ball gown. Photo by Matt Stauss.

My great-aunt Nancy is 82, and she still lives in the house the Swedes, her own grandparents, built in 1885. In 1977, she came back to help take care of her mother and father, and the farm. In fact, she has been taking care of the farm off and on since she was a child. She says she has the “agrarian imperative” that my grandmother never felt, and she still wears her faded blonde hair in two braids folded over the top of her head, and as we sit in the cool interior of the big house, which her father built in the 1950s, she tells me of the time she learned first to braid. She skipped out to tell her father, Oscar, that she could. She expected him to be thrilled with this new skill. Instead, he turned to her and said, soberly, but approvingly, “It is good to be independent.”

My grandmother, who is ten years older, did all the glamorous stuff — worked in New York in the fashion industry, went to Europe, decided she wanted to live there, had exciting boyfriends who painted her picture and bought her silk that she made into ball gowns. One of these gowns fits me, very snugly. Or it did a couple of years ago, when I was almost emaciated. The waist is all of 22 inches.

Aunt Nancy wonders aloud how anybody could be that skinny. And I’ve never thought about it before, but I’m glad that not everyone in the world wants to run away to Paris and be glamorous. I mean, I do, but if everyone did, I would never have experienced the farm, had these memories, come back from Europe to this.

Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Iowa:

One of the things that I do when I come to the farm is tiptoe around the basement and peek into drawers. The ancient trunks are so fragile that I don’t dare disturb them, but I look at the children’s toys from the 1950s, and crack open one or two of the books on the shelves.

USSR, the story of Soviet Russia, printed in 1944, has the mysterious inscription on the front page: “to Melchior, who once took a mote from mine eye.”

There’s a cigar box at least 50 years old that I discover contains nothing but chalk sticks and sawdust. I find a paint box with crumpled-up envelopes folded inside to protect things. I unfold one and gold paint dust comes off on my hands, and I can read the spidery writing, postmarked 1923.

I think my favorite thing I ever found in this basement was a memo my grandfather wrote when he married my grandmother. It was addressed to his geophysics company, and to the best of my memory, went something like this:

“To seismologists, computers:

“May it be known that John N. Botkin disappeared the morning of —, and turned up irrevocably married to one Halcyon Heline, a farm girl from Iowa.”

The grandmothers. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Iowa:

Grandma, my mother’s mom, and Grandmother, my father’s mom, are talking at the table. Grandmother is telling stories of Europe after the war. She went over on a steamer with her mother and her father, who worked with the president’s farm bureau at the time. Her father was interested in what was going on agriculturally in the countries that were just coming out of the war.

“He wore a nice hat, and a nice overcoat, and he looked prosperous. When he told them his credentials, they treated him like a senator or something. When we were in Berlin — I think it was Berlin — Berlin was nothing but a pile of bricks — they gave us our own rail car. It was all done in red velvet,” says Grandmother.

Meanwhile, she had made friends with people on the steamer ship to Europe, and managed to find a job with the American Embassy in Paris. So she ended up staying in Paris for a few years.

“You were very brave to do that, so young,” says Grandma.

“It didn’t occur to me to be afraid,” says Grandmother. She talks about one of her colleagues at the Embassy, a girl who had been living in England. “She said she was always hungry. When she heard there were jobs in Paris, she said, I’m going to get one, so that I can eat,” says Grandmother. “She learned French in something like three weeks so she could take the test to work there. She was very determined and very bright.”

Three generations on the farm’s tractor. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Iowa:

I land in the Midwest and call my dad, who has come to pick me up from the airport for a family reunion. I’d left Paris when it was still dark, and about 22 hours later, it starts to get dark again in Iowa. I fall asleep in the back seat as we head into corn and bean fields, out to the farm where my ancestors have lived for approximately the last 150 years. The Swedes came over and eked a life from the prairie, building one house, and then another. In the 1950s, my great-grandfather built yet another house, and this is where I go now, through the screen door I have been opening at every family reunion since I’ve been big enough to reach the handle.

I arrive at the farm at around 11 p.m. and my grandmother wakes up. I go into her little bedroom and kiss her. “Hello, Grandmother,” I say “I’ve come all the way from Paris today just to see you.”

“Well,” says my grandmother, who lived in Paris herself for awhile “Isn’t that nice.”

The Blue Lagoon. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Iceland:

I have eight hours to spend in Iceland, on a layover. I already know what I’m going to do: I’m going to buy a ticket that will take me from the airport to the Blue Lagoon spa and hot springs 20 minutes away, spend a couple of hours there, and then head back. I procure the ticket, head outside, and have to dig out my coat, such is the chill of the Iceland summertime.

The landscape is wild, mostly volcanic rock draped over with a bit of moss, and I wish as we make our way to the hot springs that I was staying a bit longer. The bus driver stops, we put our hand luggage in storage, and troop in to the lagoon, where we’re handed a bracelet that will allow us to program our lockers and purchase beer at the waterside bar. I change and go outside, to be met with a flat expanse of steaming pastel blue — silica, potassium, calcium, magnesium and various algae all mixed in with geothermal seawater.

It’s raining lightly, and the patrons wade around, smearing themselves with white silica mud from specially-provided buckets. It’s supposed to be good for your skin. I’m freezing in my bikini, so I hop in and find the warmest spot in the series of pools, next to what appears to be a bubbling geyser coming straight out of porous lava rock. The floor of the pools are uneven, but have been coated with silica deposits, which makes them smooth and hard and white, at least where they’re not matted down with loose stuff. I float on my back for awhile and try out the sauna.

After I shower and dry off, I realize that my hair is still full of silica. Actually, this is a bonus, because it gives it some volume. I’m pretty sure the best hair days of my life were spent in New Zealand’s geothermal regions, when the shower water was similarly endowed with silica, and my normally flat locks bloomed with minerals. I have some health food, since I’m in that sort of mood, and not long afterwards get on the airplane sleepy and relaxed.

Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in France:

In Paris, I’m attending Localization World, which is basically concerned with how to make money in other languages, or at least other cultures. Part of the backstage production involves how to get attendees from the conference venue to our cruise for dinner. We’re paying nearly 100 euros for this dinner cruise on Le Paquebot, supposedly the biggest ship on the Seine, so we’re expecting good service.

There are busses all arranged, and I go down and find them outside the Palais des Congres without too much trouble. So far, so good. I jump in. It’s egregiously hot inside, and the Italian man across from me starts to complain. I run to the front of the bus and ask the driver to turn the air on. He obliges, and we’re off.

We pass the Arc de Triomphe, and make our way to the Eiffel tower. We descend to a small quay and the driver stops. Everyone gets out. Unfortunately, where there should be a luxurious dinner boat, there is nothing. Everyone stands around waiting for something to happen. I go off to the nearest boat to see if maybe they’ve forgotten to put out the welcome sign for us, but it’s locked. By the time I get back, someone has figured out that we’re on the wrong quay. The bus driver is attempting to explain this in English, but it isn’t working very well. I step in, and he switches to French, pointing down to where the boat is actually waiting. I can’t go there easily in a bus, he tells me, but it’s a three-minute walk, just on the other side of the Parisian miniature of the Statue of Liberty.

So I lead the crowd to the boat, where there’s a whole committee standing with plastered-on smiles and a strained look in their eye. We’re the first bus to make it to the destination, which is not a promising sign.

We wait for awhile, and others trickle in, some on foot, some by way of the busses. Apparently, their busses got lost as well, but the drivers were able to work it out to close proximity. Soon, there is only one bus missing. Someone checks Twitter. There’s a tweet from a passenger: the bus has gotten stopped by the police because the driver was talking on his cell phone trying to work out where exactly the quay was. At this point, a group of passengers decided to take matters into their own hands, got off the bus in the middle of traffic, and started walking. In the wrong direction.

Chastised by the police, but duly notified of where to go, the last bus driver escorts his remaining passengers to the boat. They get out. The welcome committee waits for the last twenty people or so, nervously checking the time. The boat is almost two hours behind schedule. It starts to rain. Ten more minutes, they say. We’re only waiting ten more minutes.

The last twenty appear down the alleyway, dressed for dinner in their heels and ruffles. They approach, clop-clop-clop, and march down the gangplank, plunk-plunk-plunk. They are hungry, as is everyone else, but dinner hasn’t been served yet, because the boat hasn’t left.

When it is served, it’s a bit sparse, although it’s tasty. We float past Notre Dame, we float under the Pont Neuf, we have prolonged views of the glittering Eiffel tower. I decide that the price of entry must have been for the experience. Paris by night isn’t bad, even in the rain.