Finding Idaho, Finding Myself: An Exploration of Relationships, Growth, & Place

Before leaving Texas, I hadn’t experienced certain states of mind. Notably, I hadn't felt anxiety—but that would come later—and particularly in this instance, loneliness. As teenagers, learning about new emotions as they present themselves, we often inflate and exploit the recesses of our emotional development. After breakups or leaving old homes and friends behind, we might receive a taste of something like loneliness and then exaggerate its effect because even if it sometimes seems like the very least, most of us have our families. Family is a comfort blanket and one many overlook. I was for the first time without even my family, at least within the context of what was familiar, and I couldn’t foretell how the cold, staggering gale might affect me. I was lonely living in Pocatello. I worked the graveyard shift at the potato processing plant, the warehouse was mechanically deafening, and our dress code included noise-canceling headphones. I spent my lunch sleeping in my car. I slept during the day. I realized at one point that I hadn’t opened my mouth to speak in weeks—I went three weeks without saying, and possibly longer.

Depression soon followed loneliness and while my family has a history of depression, my dad and sister both suffered, throughout my childhood, my depression remained mostly dormant. Well, depression awoke from stasis with redress. Although I was sociable and optimistic in my youth, I kept a great deal private, as if I lived two distinct lives, the most raw and reflective life I was living existed almost exclusively in my head. If you’ve been reading this autobiographical series, you know that about me. My two lives existed only because I didn’t know how to communicate my feelings or ask for help and guidance. Regarding depression, it got to be too much, and one evening I called home and talked to my dad. My memory has me calling home from a payphone (they still existed at the time), it was raining, and the only way I could distinguish between the rain and my tears was the taste of salt in my mouth. During this conversation, I learned about my family’s history of depression, I didn’t know about it before then, and my dad encouraged me to see a psychiatrist. I started taking citalopram for depression. I didn’t go to therapy, because I didn’t know how or what to talk about, and depression, unlike other emotional disorders, doesn’t always have a catalyst besides serotonin imbalance.

          There’s an orange brick house on S. Lee Avenue, south of 3^rd Street in Idaho Falls, a fourplex with a unit available when I most needed it. The house was the most decent, cheapest place I could find in the timeframe I wanted. I moved in quickly. After I left Texas, I owned only what I could fit into my car. I found an old bed frame and mattress at a thrift store in Pocatello, both of which I consigned to the basement of Brentwood Manor Apartments before leaving. I found a new, old mattress at GoodWill or Deseret Industries for my new place, an old wingback chair poorly upholstered was left in my new unit, and I found a futon on the side of the road that I hauled haphazardly from where I found it to the fourplex. My first experience with futons was in Japan, accordingly the word “futon” had a slightly different connotation for me growing up, but the American futon I found inspired a love of American futons shadowing me to this day. I love ‘em, futons. The Fourplex is roughly four blocks from downtown Idaho Falls and seven blocks from the Snake River. The Snake River is, without exception, my favorite affiliation with Idaho Falls, it’s beautiful, especially along the Greenbelt Trail.

          The travelogue I wrote while at the Villa weeks before was published by Idaho Falls Magazine and I accepted a Contributing Writer designation with the magazine. Also, I took a job at the now-defunct Hastings Entertainment (the Harbor Freight on 17^th Street sits today where Hastings was then). I wanted to be involved with the books side of things, Hastings if you are too young to remember, focused on new and used books, music, movies, shirts, records, collectibles, and other weird shit, like Spencer’s might. Chris managed the book ‘department;’ and he didn’t like anyone else working in the book department. Chris was a pain in the ass, he was unfriendly and possessive, and I didn’t want to work anywhere near him. After three weeks on the job, I was promoted to some bullshit corporate position called “Customer Service Manager” which means absolutely nothing. I oversaw the front end, the cashiers, and the cash registers. I met Celeste at Hastings. Celeste trained me. And within a couple of months Celeste and I started seeing each other. Before another six months passed Celeste and I got married. We were young, and a part of me believed I needed to start my life, and this was how I was supposed to do that.

          Celeste moved in with me to the little fourplex on S. Lee Avenue a few blocks from downtown. She quit her job at Hastings because the company’s bylaws stated that employees couldn’t maintain relationships with management; she found work at a daycare center near the house, the Little People’s Academy Childcare Center. When I wasn’t at Hastings, I was almost always at the Villa with my laptop writing. I nurtured a desperate need to create something meaningful and was trying to develop the opportunity for that to happen by sitting there bleeding. The disconnect I struggled with most of my short life followed me to Idaho and I continued to struggle. When I talk about being desperate, I’m talking about a wretched, urgent, hopeless desperation that eluded any traction to develop into something greater. The writing I was doing at the Villa was my own. I didn’t understand the process of writing a novel and so I yearned to throw the only thing I knew how to at it, my time. I tried to write at home, but I couldn’t focus. Writing in coffee shops was pleasant and while there I found periods of focus I struggled with focus too; still, while I was there it felt like I was at least trying to accomplish something. It felt like I was going to the office for the day and simply being there felt to me or my unconscious brain was enough or perhaps, at the very least, a first step toward success.

Celeste had a hard time with that, and I don’t blame her; however, I didn’t know how not to try regardless of how misplaced my efforts were at the time. Also, I was spending small amounts of money daily, which adds up. And besides the work I was doing for Idaho Falls Magazine, I didn’t accomplish anything with my writing. In the meantime, Celeste began reevaluating her life goals, not excluding me but in recognition of me. Celeste decided to go into skincare and massage therapy and found a skincare school in Salt Lake City, Utah. Celeste and I started looking into what moving to Salt Lake City would look like. In the meantime, I had a hard time adjusting to married life; it’s challenging to intentionally develop boundaries and learn how to live with someone under the pretense of romance while maintaining your individuality. It’s important to consciously distinguish between and separate the areas in your life that might be shared, that remain personal, and that independently coexist, while communicating openly and honestly and effectively developing those intentions practically within the foundation of a marriage. I struggled with co-dependence, and I didn’t know what that was let alone how it was influencing my actions, reactions, and behaviors within Celeste’s and my relationship. Celeste also struggled with co-dependence, but it manifested differently, and I don’t know if I understand her experience well enough to try to tap into it here.

          Celeste and I were married by the Justice of the Peace in the courthouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho surrounded by a handful of Celeste’s family, all of whom are Mormon. And because I wasn’t Mormon, we weren’t allowed to marry in a church. Mormon ideology is…complicated. I might address that in greater detail in a later post. We spent our honeymoon in West Yellowstone, Montana, and much of our time in Yellowstone National Park. One evening we went to the Playmill Theatre where the community was putting on Footloose. The show was surprisingly good for Communitea theatre. We stayed at Destinations Inn in downtown Idaho Falls on the eve of our ‘ceremony.’ The hotel has themed rooms and while the hotel has since been renovated, and our room no longer exists, we shared an ‘Under the Sea,’ experience, sleeping in the bed of a king-size Oyster shell and a large-scale hot tub that was situated only steps away from the oyster.

          During our marriage, Celeste and I took a handful of trips together: I took her down to Texas to meet my family, Celeste and I went to Washington D.C., and I was with her, her mother, and stepfather, in South Dakota for my twenty-first birthday. Celeste and I also went to Jackson, Wyoming. I’d heard of Jackson before but had never been. At the time, I was calling it Jackson Hole, it wouldn’t occur to me till much later in life that Jackson Hole is the valley north of Jackson, and the town itself is simply Jackson (for those of you who don’t know. I thought it was interesting, in ways similar to that I think it’s interesting Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird” is based on Harper Lee’s childhood neighbor, Truman Capote; and that Ian Fleming, the author and creator of James Bond, also wrote Chitty Chitty f$&king Bang Bang!). I loved Jackson. Celeste and I went to Teton Village and rode a lift to one of the peaks of those majestic Tetons. We wandered through a bizarre museum near Jackson Town Square, and of course, sipped coffee and engaged in some fantastic people-watching near the iconic antler arches, also in Jackson Town Square. Something is welcoming about towns like Jackson; something unseen in the threads of these unique vistas where artists, farmers, and cowboys/girls all cohabit serenely. The connections these contradictions create are not a practice of compromise but rather synchronicity, and that’s an increasingly rare and beautiful thing.

          You could travel the world a few times over and never meet anyone like Celeste, she’s unquestionably one of the most unique people I’ve met, and in most of the best ways. Celeste is a remarkable person. While I was far more optimistic and outgoing, ambitious and inspired before and during our time together than I am now, even then, I was also more comfortable integrating within a social semblance. I had no desire to be a walking presentation of glitz; but Celeste did, and her ornate personality didn’t end with her appearance, there existed an emotional need to keep up with appearances. At 20 years old and already I was deeply concerned with behaving genuinely. I maintained my conviction passionately. It was hard to feel like I was always reciting lines in some show we always seemed to be performing in; we could have been alone in our unit on S. Lee, and our conversations felt rehearsed and recorded in front of a live studio audience. I didn’t know how to grapple with that and, I mean, how do you ask someone not to be who they inherently are? I sat with these thoughts and feelings about our relationship for most of our relationship. And neither of us deserved that.

          Celeste's grandparents were potato farmers in Idaho. Their farm was located in Ammon, a small town—I suppose it’s a town, assuming the prerequisites for a legitimate town are vaguely defined and elastic—on the outskirts of Idaho Falls. We had many family dinners there, and while I never felt accepted, mostly because I wasn’t Mormon, spending time at Celeste’s grandparent's house was warm and nostalgic. I even helped with the harvest that fall—I think, I mean, it’s possible too that I was a liability and the glee I experienced was the aftertaste of the ignorance of a shameless inadequacy; what do I know about farming? I learned to farm by watching Field of Dreams, Babe, Witness, and Sling Blade, and if you’ve seen even one of those movies you know there’s no farming. And then again, it’s equally possible that I was, indeed, a functional relief for the family. Once harvested, we stored the potatoes in what is, essentially a cellar; storage houses built underground to maintain certain temperatures, light, humidity, and aeration. We picked the potatoes by hand after Celeste’s grandfather made a pass with a vehicle that cut the vines, leaving the tubers more easily accessible for hand-picking. For those of you keeping track, I had only been in Idaho for a year, maybe a little more than a year, and already I had harvested and packaged potatoes for sale, making me more of an Idahoan than most Idahoans.

          Celeste grew up in Rigby, Idaho, roughly fifteen miles north of Idaho Falls. Rigby is home to the Farnsworth TV & Pioneer Museum because Rigby, Idaho, is where Philo Farnsworth grew up; Philo Farnsworth invented the television. Farnsworth was still in high school when he presented his ideas for television to his high school science teacher at Rigby High School. The only other notable thing about Idaho, aside from its natural beauty, is that Ernest Hemingway was resigned to Ketchum, Idaho, nearly three hours west of Idaho Falls when he took his life. Ernest Hemingway’s final resting place is in Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho. There are several things I didn’t do when I lived in Idaho and exploring Ketchum and Sun Valley, unfortunately, are among them. “A Moveable Feast” by Hemingway is one of my favorite books and was among the first books I read that effectively changed how I write.

          Celeste was accepted to Skinworks School of Advanced Skincare in Salt Lake City, Utah; and so, we started making concrete plans to move to Utah. The week before we planned to leave, Celeste and I were driving to a healthcare clinic in Idaho Falls. It was winter, the roads were icy, and after turning onto the street where the clinic was located a car, pulling out of an adjacent parking lot, didn’t bother looking before pulling in front of us onto the road and turning left. I tried to brake but the brakes locked, and we slid into the other car. It was my beloved ’99 Honda Civic we wrecked, my Civic that I wasn’t yet willing to part with, and so while their insurance paid for the damage, Celeste and I drove around for a few days in a Chrysler 300. I remember liking the car at first, but after a day or two of driving that thing, I was eager for my Civic. Fortunately, my Civic was ready the day before we trekked to Salt Lake City, Utah, where we planned to stay with Celeste’s aunt’s family in Murray, one of Salt Lake’s many neighboring towns.