Afterword

The summer of 1972, I pack my Datsun truck. I can be gone as long as my money holds out, so I decide not to eat much and drive straight through Nevada, headed for Idaho. Gas is about thirty cents a gallon, I’ve got rice, canned vegetables and a fishing pole.

My dad was born and raised in Idaho, and last I saw it, I’d been six. Before I leave, he warns me: Don’t go down to Shoup. That river will drown you. I’ve seen men drown in it. There are rattlesnakes too, he adds. But I’ve grown up on his stories about Shoup—he calls it home—and the warnings only sharpens my curiosity.

I stop to see Shoshone Falls, camping along the way after that. Four glorious days near Sunbeam— the river quick and cold, mornings scented with pine and woodsmoke and I’m hooked on Central Idaho. From there, it’s a straight shot to Shoup.

Panther Creek seems the best place to set up camp, where the rush of water sings through the night. Close by is a little store and café run by two friendly women. They keep a green lawn kept wet to discourage rattlesnakes from sunning. From there, the wandering begins—up and down the river, sitting onmassive boulders at the Pine Creek rapids, climbing a narrow trail below Shoup, walking the road above the boarded-up town. The store is open, but the old log schoolhouse is locked. I wonder where Dad’s favoriteswimming hole on Boulder Creek is, and where the old boarding house stood where they lived during the Great Depression.

I keep thinking, “This feels like home. But this is the first time I’ve been here. I think.” Maybe we drove downriver when I was six, but it’s all tangled in memory: my cousins’ ranch near Hailey, meeting old ladies who were my father’s aunts, two weeks on an ocean liner before that, then a long car ride east. Maybe I’ve been here before. Maybe not. Either way—it feels like home.

In the Shoup Store, a man appears—the storekeeper, I figure—and I ask if there are any old-timers who might have known my grandparents. He says two brothers live downriver, “but on the other side,” and I should look them up.

A few days later, I find them on their porch. We start hollering across the water.

“My dad and grandparents lived here during the depression.” I shout.

One of the men calls back, “Who?”

When I holler back, that stops them.

One jumps up, waving his arms like he might leap the river. He’s pointing to the cable car. “Get in, and come over!” he yells.

I’m too spooked—one of Dad’s stories included a drowning when a cable failed—so we keep shouting.

They knew the Callahan's on Boulder Creek and keep insisting, “No, your grandmother lived on Pine Creek!”

“I didn’t have a grandmother on Pine Creek.”

“Yes you did,” they both insist and later tell me how to find her old ranch.

Next stop: Pine Creek. I drive up to the valley. Back then it’s a Girl Scout camp, but to me it feels like a long-lost address suddenly handed back.

When I get back to California, I sit my dad and aunts down. “Tell me about the grandmother on Pine Creek.”

“Oh, Annie? She was a nut,” they say. “A schoolteacher.”

Dad adds, “I don’t think she liked my father much—she reminded him of his dad.”

“Did he tell you that?”

They all look at each other and the answer is a shrug.

"I didn't know your dad was born in Shoup."

That’s all they’ll give me. They want to hear about my trip; I want to hear about Annie. The real search won’t begin until 1988—sixteen years later—when a box of my aunt’s keepsakes sends me to the library to order microfilm of the Idaho Recorder newspaper. That’s when Annie steps out of the shadows.

Since that first trip in ’72, I’ve gone back again and again—and now weeks long visits.

I imagine Annie smiles at that—loves that I’m there.

And I smile back—because I know now that the reason downriver felt like home the summer of ’72 wasn’t just the sweep of the mountains or the rush of the river. Perhaps it’s because Annie was already here, her voice still carrying across the years.

She wasn’t a perfect person, not by a long shot. She marched to a different beat—a woman’s-rights advocate before most folks knew what to call such a thing. She was tough, sometimes to the point of insensitivity. A woman living in the backwoods, yet sophisticated—and as her early writing reveals, she wanted everyone to know it.

After her death, her sister Edna wrote to Annie’s granddaughter, recalling oddities and disappointments, remarking that Annie’s mind had been “quite unbalanced at times.” The comment was couched with talk of what little there was to inherit and stands alone among the family papers. Perhaps she was. Or perhaps she was just crazy as a fox. Yet, no one I interviewed who knew her intimately ever spoke of dementia or an unbalanced mind when I asked them directly.

Her grandson Peter Barton, remembered her fondly, saying she’d gallop her horse across the pack bridge and right into the saloon on Main Street, slide off, and leave the horse to back up and wait for her to come out. She subscribed to newspapers and periodicals and Peter was adamant when he said she was as smart as anyone he ever knew. Half wild, the other half sophisticated. Peter's sister Edna said, "she was quite a character" and Peter added, "Mom and grandmother could fight like cats and dogs, yet were inseparable."

When her son Ed got the news she’d died, he lay on his bed and cried all day.

I think I would have too.