Big Streets beginning to feel like home

Original Publish Date: July 19, 2008

I have to get used to traffic again, wide streets, turn lanes in the center, honking, other people.

I moved up from Wyoming, a town called Douglas with three big streetssurrounded by sun-scorched wheat fields lying at the foot of Laramie Peak like a rug.

Evenings, the mountain turned cool-blue and at the base where the pines started to rise, it gave it depth, like the muscles of a sleeping, breathing beast.

I cut my teeth there. I covered the courts and city and met people. I met a lot of great people.

The sheriff, a barrel of a man, cowboy hatted, mustached, as tall as he was wide and as wide as three buckets of hay side by side, testified at hearings a time or two.

"You bet your sweet ass," he'd tell the commissioners. "You're damn right about that."

He looped h is thumbs in his belt, near the plate-sized buckle, when he talked to you. They say he won the election in the bars, but that was before I got there.

When I started, an old bartender said, "Don't wear ties. The last reporter, the one before you, he wore a tie into the LaBonte.

That was the popular bar. It had brownish-orange shag rug covering the walls and years and year of cigarette smoke stuck in it. He didn't work there anymore. He was a reporter now, like me. It was my third day on the job. "So I cut it off with some scissors."

"Enough," he said. "For a bow tie."

Covering city council, the city administrator awarded the maintenance supervisor two cases of Milwaukee's Best beer to celebrate his 35th anniversary on staff.

"We didn't know what to get you," she told him at the meeting. "So we asked around and found out you liked Milwaukee's Best." Later, I did a story on him, and took a picture of him behind the two red cases stacked on his lap.

"Who does that?" Mike asked me in the interview. "Do they do that down there?" I told him they did. A little later, Mike hired me.

"You'll miss it," my boss told me when I broke the news. "You're going to have to wear a tie everyday, you know."

I'm sure I'll miss it. I know I will, but knew I had to get to Coeur d'Alene. I didn't know, but at the same time I was certain, the way you can feel who's on the other end when you're watching the telephone ring.

I called my dad and we loaded up a truck we rented in Casper, the town to the north, and drove up I-25, the only vehicle on the road, and we watched the antelope grazing in the green and brown fields, stopping to poke their heads up to watch us pass as we continued up to Sheridan.

We turned left in Montana on I-90, that beautiful old American artery, and headed through Billings, Livingston, Bozeman, and climbed with the great road past Butte and Missoula to Idaho, to the Panhandle.

"I had the time of my life," dad said after he unpacked me.

But I was sick in the stomach, sick empty and hollow in the pit of my stomach that only comes when you've decided to toss everything comfortable out the window. I hugged my dad, watched him drive off, and walked down Northwest Boulevard to City Park.

I had my dog with me, and we stopped to wait at the crosswalk before we made it to the grass. We dodged and weaved through the bicyclists, skateboarders and pedestrians and kept moving. We wrapped with the

path to the lake's edge and watched the sailboats and swimmers.

We cut back through the grass and connected to Sherman Avenue, waited at a crosswalk, crossed, then hoofed between the restaurant and cafe tables and listened to the afternoon crowd drink and chatter.

I tied Eddy, my pup, around a pole and sat at a corner table. People passed. Cars honked. Traffic moved. The waitress came out and took my order. She had deep auburn hair, as smooth and even as piano keys. I smiled. I almost forgot how pretty they could be.

I had that one and another and watched the sun recede and the lake turn purple and that sickly feeling evaporated. My pup was sleeping, head down on the pavement, even while the foot traffic continued to move, up and down the avenue, always moving.