Idaho Vs. Vermont. Round 1. FIGHT!

There's one thing Idaho's got that vermont ain't got. Hot Springs. Burning hot mineral rich water that flows right out of the earth, down mountains into cold fresh creeks where people've built pools around where the hot pours in, so you can take off yer clothes and get in the hot rock pool in a creek in the middle of nowhere in the snowy woods.


And it's awesome.

But Vermont's got summer swimming holes alll frickin' over the place. Ponds and lakes and rivers and brooks, like you could pick a new one every week and not run out by the time it's too cold to swim anymore. Big quiet lakes, quick little rivers, rocks to jump from, places only you and your friends know about til some fool blows up the spot, then you find another place to make a secret dam and sweet new secret place to go. But I suppose Idaho's got tons of those too.

One thing idaho has that Vermont certainly does not have is canyons! great big huge rock cliffs directly facing great big huge rock cliffs with rivers running in between them way at the bottom. That, along with jagged snow-capped mountains, is one of the dramatic characteristics of the landscape out here that makes out here unique. unique from Vermont anyway, because they got canyons in Utah, too, and I think there's a pretty big one in Arizona somewhere. However, I'm considering now, do gorges count? Because Queechee has a gorge, and Queechee is in Vermont. It's sorta like a canyon, just not quite as big. if it counts, disregard this paragraph.





But you know one thing that Vermont has that's not out here? Sugar maples. The magical tree that bleeds sweet water that gets boiled down to a thing syrup of pure amber golden sugary goodness. If you don't understand the sorcery in that then I can't even begin to try to convince you. In other words, if you're not from around here you just don't know.
And, as I'm in Idaho as I write this, I'm not from around here, so where's no way that I can know for sure what it's like to be from here, because as I'm thinking of all the wonderful things that either place has or lacks, I keep coming back to Idaho might have rivers to swim in but it doesn't have the rock river, may have ponds but it doesn't have south pond. It might have beautiful trees to play in but not the ones I climbed when I was little. It might be a magical place for a million people who live here or lived here or visited and loved it but to me there's no place like the place that watched me grow up. Mountains might be bigger and canyons might be deeper elsewhere, but there's no place like Vermont. Not in Oregon across the continent or New Hampshire across the river. Because I was born there, I'll probably die there and the whole time in between it'll always be my home, no matter where I am.

Plus, there's way less strip malls and no sprawling sub-divisions. And not - this should have been the first sentence of this entry - not a single solitary goddamn billboard is displayed throughout the entire state. And we were the last of the lower 48, maybe all 50 states, to allow wal-mart to trespass within the boundaries, and the first to pass civil unions, and our senator is a socialist.

Beat that.