By Gary Topping–
I grew up on the southern Oregon coast, and while I enjoyed living there, its drizzly humid climate did not always agree with me. During the first and second grades I was often sick and missed a lot of school. Eventually our family doctor told my parents that it would help a great deal if they could move inland somewhere to a drier climate. Buhl, Idaho was an obvious choice: my mother had grown up there and still had family, either in Buhl or nearby communities. So I spent the third grade there, going to school in the same building that had been the high school where my mother graduated.
During our annual trip to Oregon last summer, my wife and I decided to make a little detour, leaving the freeway at Twin Falls and driving down through Buhl and the Hagerman Valley where I could show her the dramatic springs that gush out of the canyon walls. Marianna had never been through there, and I was wondering if I could go back home. She enjoyed the drive, but my homecoming met with mixed success.
Entering Buhl from the east, we did not bother to stop at the city cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I had been there some years ago, but without a sexton on duty and lacking a map, I found that trying to locate the graves was futile.
My only success awaited me in the middle of town where the old Ramona theater still stood on Broadway. It is now painted in bright colors and transformed into a Mexican restaurant, but its exotic spires still extend up into the sky and even the sign is still there. How well I remember my mother fishing around in her change purse for a couple of dimes so my brother and I could while away a Saturday afternoon watching Roy Rogers movies. Most of the movies were in black and white, but once in a while one would be in Technicolor, and what a thrill that was! The theater issued free monthly movie calendars, listing the feature films for each day of the month, so we knew weeks ahead which cinematic cowboy was going to be on the screen.
From there we turned north to try to find my old school, but although I think my sense of direction in that small town was accurate enough to get us close, we failed to find it. I had located it on the visit some years ago when I visited the cemetery, and it was being used as a Middle School at that time, but whether it is still standing, I do not know.
Back to the center of town, we drove to 800 North Broadway, where my grandparents’ house had been located. Alas, it was gone and replaced by another structure that may not even have been a residence.
Overall, our impression was that while the downtown business district appeared active and vital, the residential districts seemed run down. Many homes were neglected, with peeling paint, dead lawns, and derelict cars out front. But the buildings themselves were of similar simple architecture to my grandparents’ house, and my imagination took me back to a quieter, less hurried time in the late 1940s when we used to sit on the shady front lawn on a warm summer evening, munching juicy chunks of watermelon and catching nightcrawlers for our fishing expeditions. Although Broadway is the main drag through town, there was very little traffic, and almost none after dark.
Later in the trip, when I began reading historian Johan Huizinga’s magnificent The Autumn of the Middle Ages, I was reminded of those summer evenings in Buhl in his description of France and the Low Countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: “Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.”
