June 24 - 0 miles - our day off in Boise. Ideal weather and a leisurely day doing the laundry, seeing a few sights of the city (botanic garden, downtown, art museum, main park) and having a nice dinner. Bought a relatively cheap guitar, as I have been missing playing - playing and singing to myself in the evening is very calming for me. As you can not hide a guitar, the entire group now knows I have it, and there is an expectation I will perform or lead a sing-along at some point. Maybe in a few days.
June 25 - 51 miles to Mountain Home, ID. A lot of Interstate riding (I-84) and consequently a lot of flats. There is a lot of junk on Interstate shoulders, but most flats were caused by tiny wires left when steel-belted car and truck tires blow out. No flats yet for me - everyone knock on wood. Otherwise, saw a lot of nothing - sage brush covered plains. But lovely nothing. It is a wide open country.
June 26 - 105 miles to Twin Falls, ID. Lovely ride through the Snake River Valley then miles of farms, in great weather with a 20 mph tail wind. Riding at its best. Highlight of the day was visiting the Clear Springs Trout Farm at the bottom of the Snake River Canyon in Buhl - a place where I installed a wastewater treatment plant some 30 years ago - see notes below.
June 27 - 44 miles to Burley, ID. Again passing miles and miles of wheat and potato fields with a strong tailwind and little hill climbing. The easiest day yet. Highlight was seeing Shoshone Falls of the Snake (211 ft drop - photogenic), which meant riding down and back up 500 ft into the Canyon. As it was an easy day, AbB organized a scavenger hunt during the day. Not my thing or that of half the group, but the review and award ceremony gave a lot of laughs. A very good natured group.
Thoughts:
Diversity and Acceptance in Boise -
According to city literature, Boise is about 92% white, 6% hispanic, 1.5% Indian or Asian, and 0.5% black. In other words, a very white area, and the lack of diversity was surprising to me, coming from the melting pot of New York. Beyond this, I suspect that many of the hispanics in the area are migrant laborers (if these are counted at all), as during the rides I saw many fairly poor looking trailers in the back of fields, which I presume are for the laborers.
These stats and Idaho's reputation as a quite conservative place led me to wonder about how accepting the people are of diversity - race, religion, political, etc. Then, by chance, I happened to eat lunch at a restaurant downtown below the local offices of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Most of you may know that IRC is one of the major non-government organizations running refugee assistance programs around the world, and that my daughter Amy works for IRC. Well, IRC is also involved in resettling refugees from the hot spots around the world into the United States. I could not resist, so went upstairs, found a manager to talk with, introduced myself (referencing Amy), and inquired about IRC's work in Boise. Turns out that IRC settled 263 refugees in the Boise area in 2007 and is on track to settle even more in 2008. Acoording to the manager, IRC has found Idaho to be very accepting of refugees. While there, I saw an obviously African family and what looked like a Burmese family meeting with IRC staff. So there you go, surely lack of diversity by New York standards or America as a whole, but perhaps this is related to historic development, and the culture is accepting. Got to be open to various explanations.
Re-visiting Personal History -
In the late 1970's, I worked a while for Inmont, a paint and ink company that just happened to own a trout farm and processing plant at the bottom of the Snake River canyon in Buhl, Idaho. While at that job, I had a project to design and install a wastewater treatment plant for the trout processing plant (which had been flushing the trout guts and blood to the Snake), and to devise a method of preventing the fecal matter of the millions of trout in the farm from being flushed to the Snake. All told, I went to Buhl some 7 times and spent maybe 2 1/2 months there over 2 years. Since the 70's, I have never been back.
Our bike route happened to go only 4 miles from the trout farm, so I could not help taking a diversion to see how things are now. Was any of my work still in use? What I found was interesting, from the sense that you never know how things will work out. As it turns out, the Thousand Springs Trout Farm owned by Inmont was sold to a neighboring trout farm company, now called Clear Springs Food, by far the largest trout producer in America. Clear Springs demolished the 1000 Springs processing plant and wastewater treatment plant I built, consolidating production into their plant. They also rebuilt the trout raceways and sold off some of the land, which is now a golf course with luxury homes. Sounds like much of the story of America over the last 30 years.
However, one thing from my work 30 years ago survived: the system I devised to capture and recycle the fish manure. Back then, I bought a big vacuum truck and invented what is essentially an industrial sized pool vacuum, with which the manure could be vacuumed from the raceways into the vac truck. The truck, with a special air agitation system to prevent the manure from setting up, was then driven up out of the canyon, and the manure sprayed on to potato fields as fertilizer, recycling what was once flushed to the Snake. Well, this system is still in use, and has been adopted by all the trout farms in the area, and the potato farmers line up for the rich fertilizer. I felt good that I had some long lasting effect on the area. Some say you should never go back but sometimes it works out OK.
(By the way, 1000 Springs is alos the site of one of my most frequently told travel stories, "Why I Don't Eat Trout", which I have included in this blog just for fun. Please see "blogs and stories.")
