One of which let to me hitchhiking through a windy canyon road before a kind soul picked me up and drove me 35 miles to Boise to seek mechanical assistance. Plus I dealt with two breakdowns of the car I bought to drag me through the winter snow. I went to a rodeo in Riggins, Idaho and then my first ever demolition derby in Lewiston, Idaho (just across the Snake River from Clarkson, Washington). When I started to settle in Idaho, I let my fingers do the walking across my keyboard and throughout the internet to find things to do out here. So on my days off I got back on the bike and resumed my back country explorations. But my appetite for wanderlust and socialization was left stilted. I got a job as a ranch hand on an organic farm run by a couple of sweet-as-agave octogenarians. A bucolic town of 3,000 people that sits high up in the North Fork Mountains two and a half hours north of Boise, McCalm, as I dubbed it, has a gorgeous lake, a ski mountain, lots of hiking trails, and a couple of grocery stores, one of which even sells guns! And just like that I realized I had found myself living in a shotgun shack, in another part of the world, asking myself “Well, how did I get here?”Īfter a winter of relative solitude and skiing, of both alpine and nordic varieties, when the snow began to melt I started venturing outward.

When fall came I ended up settling down in McCall, Idaho. In June of 2020 I tossed my keys at my NYC landlord and took off on my motorcycle for what I thought would be a few months of literally riding out the pandemic. From the largest city in America to an official resident of our country’s smallest town.

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