We pack up and walk down to the lake. Celeste spots a frog sitting in a clump of sedge, bobbing with the wavelets, unconcerned. At the far end of a dock a plover paces back and forth, occasionally cocking its head over the water. The lake is screened on both sides by dense stands of pine. Straight ahead of us is a tiny island covered with pines. You could wade to it. In the center is a picnic table. The site of many a merry midnight meeting, no doubt.
I make another trip to the outhouse, this one newer and less abused. While I'm in there I think for the hundredth time of Scooter's comical description of the moment of panic when you're in the stall and someone tugs on the door: at the shock and sound of the loud metallic clunk you involuntarily jerk your hands up to form a rectangle around the door– "like you're framing a shot," he said.
A toilsome drive to Boise through the plains between the Wallowas and the Sawtooths
We stop in Baker for gas but the ice machine is broken– barely enough for our drink machine, the woman behind the counter says; she is heavy-set with tinted glasses set in heavy plastic frames.
There's a strange, sharp ache just under my right knee by the time we get to Boise and the walk from our parking place by St. Luke's is welcome. But when we cross the street and see Bar Gernika's tables stacked on the sidewalk, all our aches and pains are forgotten in our disappointment. We are forced to cross the street to Bardenay, a brew and distiller pub. It's not so bad: this place is considerably more corporate, but at least the restaurant is air-conditioned. On the huge flatscreen TV is some soccer match sponsored by Herbalife.
By the time we climb into the hills north of Mountain Home we are seething with sweat. Opening the windows is like setting a fan in front of an open oven and sticking your face in the current. The road winds through yellow hills decorated with grotesque shapes of granite: great lobes and petals and agglutinations. After Featherville, a collection of newish log houses and very old places with stone fronts or weathered white paint, we climb into a terrain of wooded ridges and canyons, finally descending into a broad river valley covered by yellow-green grass and open pine stands. In the grass you can see elbows and broad aprons of amber water scouring granite cobble. The pavement is replaced by an oiled gravel road and eventually we come to Baumgartner, a busy campsite centered on a built-up hot spring fitted with a painted concrete tub and benches. The river is broad and loud here. As I bang over the speed bump by the pay station the camp "host" yells angrily at me to slow down and reiterates the posted 15-mile speed limit. My speedometer, of course, reads 15.
The campsite is capacious and we have no problem finding room for the tent. The ground is rocky, though, so we have to guy the tent to cobbles.
We walk up a short trail above the hot spring and read the plaques the Forest Service made. The trail crosses the creek that feeds the tub and we look at the green/black algae that covers the rock, a pure white and angular species of granite. We read of John Baumgartner, a gold miner and ranger who emigrated from Bavaria in the late 19th century and deeded his land to the Forest Service. He eventually took the job of first ranger in that part of the Sawtooths and worked to improve access.
Another such pioneer, if not in the historic sense, then in the sense of a pubic conviction and vision, was this caretaker and National Guardsman who worked to restore the Fremont Power Station, Command Sergeant Major Joe Batty, now deceased. This was the improbable bit of stone Romanesque architecture that served the miners and the village near Olive Lake. I imagine he studied with care the shape and intricacies of the ancient wooden water line that piped Olive Lake's potential as white, rushing power for the turbines. A section lies by the Forest Service's plaque, bristling with the circular rods that passed through a turnbuckle and seized the two-foot diameter pipe together.
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