A little yellow suitcase sits in the basement: inside it, a little red pillow. Traveler’s gear for a child of long ago. If I open it, I hear echoes.
I also search for Idaho Spud Bars at the most rural and isolated places. You can't find them at your convenience store operated by a big chain or franchise. The bar hasn’t changed since 1909: the same shiny dark wrapping, same chocolate-coated, coconut-encrusted potato-shaped bar with yummy, pillowy, light chocolaty marshmallow inside, created to mimic the famous Idaho spuds. They melt in my mouth. They comfort me.
I used to travel with my mother and father when my dad went to Wyoming to buy cattle.
Napping quietly on the little red pillow in my mother’s lap, I’d awaken when the car stopped in front of the ramshackle grocery store with its towering roof-top sign, Hell’s Half Acre, held up by the devil himself, with his pointy ears, pointy beard, pointy rake and his pointy red boots.
We arrived at the scariest place in my world: a huge breach in the earth, a hole hundreds of feet deep with caves, ravines, frightful skeletal rock formations and a flat ominous bed at its bottom with the bones of buffalo and stone arrowheads.
The only thing separating me from certain death was a flimsy wire fence. My dad would laugh and yell yoo hoo, his echoes bouncing back to me, until I too yelled yoo hoo. My mother didn’t laugh; didn’t yell. Hung back. Till we got returned to the safety of the grocery store, a coke, and an Idaho Spud Bar.
Hell’s Half Acre, the emptiness of vast prairies with sudden rainstorms, old, cold hotel rooms, isolated country roads. My father laughing, battered felt cowboy hat on his head, disappearing on horseback through the prairie or into crowded, smoky bars or scary-looking ramshackle ranch houses. He, always smiling, my mother grim, frightened, angry, occasional tears.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Life is like that.
