Hungry for the World: A Memoir

WHEN I WAS A GIRL IN LEWISTON, Idaho, there were two downtown movie theaters, a drive-in that showed second-run films from June through August, a pea-processing plant, and a railroad that ran the perimeter of the town's north side. There were two buildings with elevators to the second floor, and in one sat an elderly man on a chrome-runged stool, his hand on the lever that would take us one flight up and back down. We ate egg salad sandwiches on the mezzanine of Miller's Department Store, where our written receipts were hung by clerks from a wire that turned on its pulleys and carried the paperwork to the accountant upstairs. Many of the old buildings no longer exist, gutted during a run of summers in the sixties and seventies we all remember as the time of fire, when Main Street seemed destined to burn to the ground, one historic structure after another: the Elks Temple, C.O.D. Laundry, the Hotel Idaho, Kling's, Hughes, The Smoke Shop, but not the store with diamonds and pearls in its windows, whose dividing fire barrier would soon bear a plaque inscribed THE WALL THAT SAVED THE WEST. Had it not been there, the flames might not have been stopped, continuing on to Gibson's Clothing and Aleuridine's Hall of Cards. A few blocks east, a bar advertising karaoke hides the charred remains of Dave's Drug, where a policeman, responding to an attempted burglary, had thrown himself atop a homemade bomb and saved his partner's life. I can still see the newspaper photo-the single, black shoe left strangely upright, its laces still tied, as though the officer had simply evaporated, let his soul leap up and away. I remember those mornings thick with the dust of harvest and wind, weeks when the blue sky became something oppressive, not pure but hateful, and the clouds that blossomed atop the Blue Mountains and the Seven Devils at first caught our hope and then our resigned disinterest: not rain but another forest burning, another call for volunteers, another plea for food and supplies. Plumes of smoke rose black and oily from the city's four corners: one day it was the National Guard Armory, torched by an arsonist to protest the slaying of students at Kent State. And then Payless Drug, Shell 011, Lewiston Tire and Supply. The heat lay in the valley long past midnight, when the old-timers sat on their porches after their garden suppers of tomato-and-cheese sandwiches, cucumbers and Walla Walla Sweets floated in vinegar, late corn made tough by too little water and not enough night. They watched the tugs push their slow way up the Snake, past the confluence and into the narrower current of the Clearwater. They saw how the flat-bottomed barges wallowed heavy with their loads of grain and lumber, and they remembered before the dams and levies, when the rivers had meant something other than commerce, when the bums had claimed the sloughs as their own and slept beneath the cooling leaves of cottonwood. ********** IN THE SPRING OF 1976, when I turned eighteen, there was the whisper of another such summer. The promise was there, in the early bloom of lilacs and dogwoods, in the way people left their windows cracked open at night. My grandmother, Nan, planted her tomatoes early, and she forgot to watch the buds of her cherry trees for signs of late frost. "It'll be a hot one," she said, nodding at the surety of her prediction as she leaned on her rake, scooped a fingernail of dirt from the garden and sniffed it for moisture. Although severely crippled by a childhood illness, she worked her large lot in the cool of the morning and evening, hooking the heavy loops of hoses with her hoe, limping across the yard she meant to keep green. Afternoon was her time of rest. Before her nap, she and I would sit at her dinette, deafened into silence by the swamp cooler's roar, drinking tumbler after tumbler of iced tea, eating the backs and legs of fried chicken. I watched as she snapped the bones and sucked out the marrowBarnes, Kim is the author of 'Hungry for the World: A Memoir' with ISBN 9780375502286 and ISBN 0375502289.