A new rural West is being born in Idaho
Guest opinion by Jerry Brady
Jerry Brady is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He
is president of the Post Company in Idaho Falls, and was a Democratic candidate
for governor in Idaho in 2002.
Recently, an acclaimed young writer and a
world-renowned opera singer charmed a packed house in Driggs. What were they
doing there instead of a place a hundred times larger? The answer tells us
something about the future of rural Idaho.
The writer was Ann Patchett, whose most
recent novel, "Bel Canto," draws its intensity from the art of opera and the
unexpected relationships that bloom between revolutionaries and their hostages.
"Bel Canto" has become a favorite of book clubs throughout the United States and
of the growing number of "one book" cities, cities where a large group of people
choose to read and discuss the same book at the same time.
Well over 100 communities, including
Boise, asked Patchett to read this year, yet she agreed to read only at Driggs
and a few other towns. Why? The prospect of hiking in the Tetons.
The opera star was Kristine Ciesinski, a
veteran of La Scala in Milan. Locally, she is perhaps best known as a teacher at
Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, as a captain of the Idaho Falls Wing
of the Civil Air Patrol and as chair of the Teton Valley Hospital Foundation.
She fell in love with the mountains while performing with the Grand Teton Music
Festival in Jackson, Wyo., and moved to Teton Valley, Idaho, in l995.
This leads to an obvious lesson for rural
Idaho: People visit and then choose to live in beautiful places. This is often
forgotten in the dozens of decisions made by planning and zoning boards,
governments and individual citizens. Mountains will remain mountains, but humans
control valley floors, water quality and the environment where people live.
Retirement and investment income is now
the largest source of income in most rural Idaho counties. These new residents
are people who don’t work, usually don’t move in with children, but who do have
money to spend.
The second lesson goes to the matter of
leadership. For years, I’ve admired how Teton Valley has promoted economic
development and the arts, protected sensitive land and water and funded a
hospital—remarkable for a town of 1,000 and a county of 6,000. The schedule for
its youth recreation program is printed in both English and Spanish—which tells
you another way it is ahead of other places in the region.
Teton County is nonetheless a tough place
to make a living. Between 1970 and 2000, average earnings fell from $24,000 to
$17,000, adjusted for inflation. No wonder hundreds of people commute over a
difficult pass to Jackson, for work every day.
Preparing for and accommodating growth has
led to mighty struggles over the years. Because earlier county commissioners
gave little attention to planning, hundreds of homes have been scattered across
the valley, increasing the cost of school busing, police and ambulance service.
Growth and zoning issues have been at the center of every recent election.
In a question-and-answer session, Patchett
was asked why she writes the books she does, which seemed to the questioner so
different, one from another. "Most writers have one central story they keep
telling over and over again," she replied. "The story in all my books is about
people who come together as strangers and form a family."
This is the story Teton Valley residents
are struggling to write about themselves. They are trying to build a true
community, one organization and one event at a time.
However, after the concert, one old-timer
told a reporter that while he enjoyed the performance, he was also sad. He said
it marked the passage of the old Teton Valley and the arrival of the new. But
the old and the new can make a rich mix in all of rural Idaho if both sides work
to make a go of it.
Kristine Ciesinski is a newcomer who has
done just that. She took up flying, volunteered and set aside the frantic
busyness that goes with operatic stardom. While I have no statistics, it seems
to me that more newcomers like her "stick" on the Idaho side of the Tetons
because of the vibrancy of the local organizations that welcome them.
Ciesinski may have come for the mountains;
she stayed because she was needed. The central story in Teton Valley may,
therefore, be just the opposite of its pattern of habitation. People come
thinking they want to live apart on 20 acres. But they stay because they
discover community.
Forty years ago, the musical "Oklahoma"
sang of how "The farmer and the cowboy can be friends." The song of today’s
Idaho is still being written.