Washington state, where I grew up, was (in the 1960s and 1970s) very blue-collar: loggers and farmers and manufacturing plants. Oregon was artsy and progressive and beatnik and liberal and hippyish.
Idaho was something else again.
I went to college in Spokane, close to the Idaho state line. The attraction of Idaho was that it had a lower drinking age (in those days, anyway); everyone wanted to rush over there on his 19th birthday. But Idaho was also home to the Old Catholics who'd rebelled against Rome after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. It was (and is) also the home of any number of crazy-ass survivalist cults. Remember Ruby Ridge? K-R-A-Z-Y. Remember the Unabomber? (Well, he lived in Montana, but it's almost the same thing.)
Back in the 1980s, I was in a restaurant in Coeur D'Alene on a Sunday afternoon, and I made the mistake of ordering a drink. I had briefly forgotten that Idaho was completely dry on Sundays in those days. The waitress focussed a strange get-thee-behind-me-Satan look on me. “You're not from Idaho, are you?” she breathed.
Napoleon Dynamite, bless his heart, lived in Preston, Idaho, near the Utah border. By rights, the country between Utah (crazy Mormons) and Idaho (crazy crazy people) should be the craziest place of all. But, for some reason, the craziest place is the Idaho panhandle, in the north between Washington and Montana and British Columbia. They corner the market on insanity up there. I used to hear of people who left Spokane in an RV, and drove through the Idaho panhandle on their way to Glacier National Park in Montana, and were never heard from again.
Brrr.
Now: look at this lovely website inviting you to visit beautiful Idaho!
(But I wouldn't if I were you.)
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