My Idaho Odyssey: Finding Home in the Unlikeliest of Places

I was taken by the mountains, snow, unfamiliarity, and my apartment. Technically, it was a studio apartment, and my room’s layout was as follows: my windows were southeast and east facing, and my front door was southeast facing, and so you walked into a small foyer before the space opened up. To the left was the kitchen. Imagine a fairly ornate 1930s-style set of cabinet and drawer handles, with a white and dark oak wood palette in a good-sized closed-room L-shaped layout with a small window on the far side of the wall that faced east toward the Portneuf Mountain Range—not a particularly grand mountain range, but beautiful, nonetheless. Halfway into the room to the south was the bathroom with features similar to the kitchen. In the back of the large studio space at the center of the rear wall was another small room, the room was big enough only for a modest queen-sized bed with enough space on either side for a small bedside table. Three of the four walls of this room were windows east, southeast, and south-facing making up at least two-thirds of each wall vertically. The fourth wall was a set of French doors that opened into the otherwise single large studio room. I loved this apartment, in part too because it was only $350 a month.

          Molly would come over often. She would bring her Pomeranian pup when she did, that dog (whose name I cannot remember) went everywhere with Molly. I didn’t like it; the dog, all it did was yap, eat, and pee. Molly was taking that dog outside to pee every twenty minutes. I joked with Molly—honestly, it was more of a gritty suggestion—that I should wrap a rope around the Pom and lower it to the earth below from one of the windows. Molly didn’t like the idea at all. She and I dated briefly. I mentioned before that she had her radio show. I enjoyed joining her in the studio during her radio hours hanging out and talking between her “On Air” moments. Molly used to tell me stories of her daydreams where she and I would run a horse ranch in southeastern Idaho. They were good stories, and I liked the idea of being a part of someone’s plans but was more or less appalled by the idea of living in Idaho my whole life running a horse farm in the snow. Molly’s birthday fell on a date we were together. I took her out to dinner, she and the dog spent the night at my apartment, and that morning before we went out for breakfast Devendra Banhart, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, called her to sing Happy Birthday. Molly and Devendra met at Coachella, I think, and have been friends since.

          Moving to a new place you don’t think about how your habits change. Some things perhaps, those things that you might be eager to see change. The first time I walked into Fred Meyer, knowing that I needed to learn about a new grocery store was an interesting experience; and I don’t even know why, I don’t have a quip recounting the growth earned after shopping somewhere other than H-E-B. For those unfamiliar, H-E-B is the single greatest grocery store on the planet; almost exclusively a Texas-based grocer, H-E-B and Central Market stock nearly every product available including reasonably priced organic and health food products. The only other grocery store I was familiar with, at that point in my life, was Albertsons. H-E-B ran Albertson’s out of most of Texas. There are Kroger’s in Dallas and Houston (which surprised me, I just learned that). Moving to Idaho, I was introduced to unfamiliar grocers competing with H-E-B. I didn’t know what to expect from leaving Texas but also, of course, settling somewhere else. I suppose I imagined that living somewhere unfamiliar would be dramatically different. Beyond the weather, varied shopping options, and diverse people (turns out experience reveals can be categorized into just a dozen or so distinct types), I was starting to discover that, fundamentally, very little changes.

          After I moved to Idaho, I took the first job I could get in a hurry. I accepted a job working the drive-through at a Taco Bell while I took my time looking for a better job. I hated it, I hated every second of being there, and I knew I would. I worked at Taco Bell before. My second job was at Taco Bell in my hometown. I spent ten hours there over two consecutive Sundays before throwing anything that said “Taco Bell” on the floor and walking away. In Pocatello, I worked at Taco Bell for roughly three weeks before I accepted a job at ConAgra Lamb Weston. A food processing plant outside of Pocatello. I was hired to operate a packaging machine overnight.

In one corner of the warehouse, near the receiving doors, are a few rows of packaging machines, and I would stand on the platform of this machine and keep it stocked with interlocked [flat] boxes. The machine would grab a box and drag it to the conveyor belt, open and fold the box, and position the box so that the packaged potatoes coming off the conveyor belt would slip inside—there are six packages of potatoes per box—and then close the box and send the box away on the conveyor belt. Sometimes the machine would get jammed. I had to turn off the machine, lock it in the off position, open the packaging machine, rummage around inside the parts to disentangle it, close the packaging machine, unlock it, turn it back on, and then continue restocking boxes. People have lost limbs. The warehouse was short on packaging machine operators. When I went to an interview for the job it was for a different position, and after talking to me they asked if I would be interested in packaging machine operator instead—the job paid better so I conceded. However, the job required me to work seven days a week and twelve hours a day, and it was a graveyard shift.

          The hours at work started to strain my life, but I wasn’t bothered by it. It was the middle of winter, and there wasn’t a lot I wanted to do. I didn’t ski. My relationship with Molly was good but wasn’t going anywhere. We stopped seeing each other when I took the overnight job and started seeing less of each other because I was working nights and sleeping through much of the day. Since then, Molly never operated a horse ranch; instead, she moved to Los Angeles and became, kind of, a counterculture icon, joining the cast of the docuseries reality show Fangasm. The reality show was about super fandom culture. She’s very much into Cosplay and does stand-up comedy throughout the greater LA area. I doubt she’s even seen a horse in years. She still cares for Pomeranians; it could be the same dog, how long do those things live? I daydreamed a lot while I was at work. Working twelve hours a day, seven days a week overnight at 19 years old is a lot, and I got through it inventing stories in my head. Working at ConAgra Lamb Weston was bittersweet. I was able to start building a life in Idaho because of it, but I had to think of the job as the on-ramp to whatever was coming next.

          My immediate supervisor at the processing plant was a piece of shit. We started on good terms because I had a good work ethic and wanted to be there. There’s a rule, a law perhaps, even: when handling food in Idaho you need to cover your hair, including facial hair. ConAgra Lamb Weston requires employees handling food to be clean-shaven. I wasn’t handling food. One evening I came to work and started stocking boxes on my assigned processing machine and was interrupted by someone who told me my supervisor wanted to speak to me. “You didn’t shave today,” he said. I ran my fingers down my face and made some joke, my supervisor chuckled and continued. “Why didn’t you shave?” Instead of saying, ‘Because I didn’t feel like shaving,’ I told him I didn’t have a razor. My supervisor's response was, “That’s not my problem.” Not only did his response piss me off but it didn’t really correlate with the conversation. “I’m sorry, I’ll shave before I come in tomorrow.” “That doesn’t solve my problem now.” “I don’t know what you want me to do.” And again, he said, “That’s not my problem.” The conversation continued with no foreseeable direction and when he again said, “That’s not my problem.” I responded, “Alright, next time I’ll go to your house and use your razor.” My supervisor didn’t like that at all and told me to take the night off. Most interactions with management went something like that. The processing plant is loud and we’re all working nonstop, we didn’t talk much, even if we wanted to, we would have been screaming—my voice doesn’t carry.

Quarterly, the ConAgra facilities close for twenty-four hours and do massive cleansing. We all dress in aluminized suits, connect fire department-grade intake hoses to nozzles that release extremely hot water, hose the entire place down, scrub with industrial brushes, and hose again. The most memorable thing was that it was almost impossible to see anything. The water was so hot the vizors would steam, and there was nothing we could do to prevent or clean them. I worked at the processing plant through one cleansing. Shortly after the cleaning, ConAgra Lamb Weston closed the plant for the weekend over the Easter holiday, the company gave everyone an Easter ham. I took my ham home, tied a rope around it, and practiced lowering it outside my apartment window to the grass below; I’m screwing with you; I didn’t do that. I gave my ham to a coworker who had a large family. I learned something while working there—I learned many things there—and one notable thing is that ConAgra employs people whose job description is to bring undocumented workers from Mexico to Idaho, provide them with fake citizenship documents, and put them to work. Bob, who spoke very little English, confirmed this in the lunchroom one night shortly after I learned about it from another coworker. I’ve always been frustrated about the duality our government demonstrates, speaking to one thing and doing another, regardless of what that may be and of political affiliation. Hypocrisy regardless of how it is presented, I do not abide, and again regardless of affiliation.

          ConAgra Lamb Weston was closed so I had four days off from work. It’s been months since I’ve had a day off, let alone four consecutive days and there was no way I would let it go to waste. So, I slept through the first day and the following night. I woke up on Saturday renewed. I have heard a lot about the nearby town, Idaho Falls. Idaho Falls is an hour north of Pocatello. I researched the town a little and discovered that the Museum of Idaho had an exhibit called Ink & Blood about the earliest days of writing. So, I drove up to Idaho Falls, parked in a small lot adjacent to the Snake River off Memorial Drive, walked up and down the river for a few minutes, and then wandered around downtown as I slowly made my way to the Museum of Idaho five blocks away. I walked by a coffeehouse on Park Avenue called the Villa, made a mental note, and headed for the museum. The exhibit was incredible. The focus was on writing between the penning of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gutenberg and included authentic Dead Sea Scrolls. The exhibit was more religious than I was expecting, intriguing, nevertheless. Afterward, I went to the Villa. I sat at the counter and ordered a croissant sandwich and a Chai. After eating, I started writing a brief travelogue about my Idaho Falls experience on a napkin and left the napkin on the counter when I left.

          The Villa Coffeehouse became one of my favorites nationwide that afternoon. I talked to the owners and a few employees at length; after finishing my Chai I ordered a second and sat by the fireplace watching the fire and talking to whomever might be sitting nearby. I drove back to Pocatello that night and spent the next day lounging and thinking. I was supposed to return to work the next day. But come Monday, I decided I wouldn’t return to ConAgra Lamb Weston, and drove back to Idaho Falls. I wandered back into the Villa and Melanie, one of the owners, had recovered the travelogue I’d written on the napkin and asked me if I would publish it in Idaho Falls Magazine. I wrote a lot about my experience at the Villa on that napkin. I planned on writing at the Villa that morning, so I brought my laptop along this time. I rewrote the travelogue and submitted it to the Idaho Falls Magazine while at the Villa. I drove back to Pocatello that night and instead of going to work I went to sleep, and the next day started outlining my move to Idaho Falls, Idaho.

          As I reflect on my Idaho odyssey, I realize that home is not just a place, but a state of mind. Amidst the majestic mountains and unexpected encounters, I discovered a sense of belonging within myself. Idaho, once an unfamiliar landscape, became a canvas for self-discovery, transformation, and growth. Though life's journey is unpredictable, I've learned to embrace the beauty of uncertainty, knowing that home is wherever the heart finds its story.