Good People Make Good Places

While I was trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, a process still under way, our son had little choice but to come along on the trip. It was quite a journey. We lived in eight different cities while Lee was growing up.

Lee proved there may be truth to the currently overused pronouncement: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

No doubt it was difficult for Lee to periodically leave good friends and adjust to a new community and school. I've often regretted causing those problems for him. But I think he became a man of integrity and honor who has been able to adapt to difficult situations partly because of his diverse experiences. The nature of two communities we lived in may have contributed positively to his development.

Forbes latest list of the top 10 best places to raise a family in the U.S. includes two cities where we have lived. Forbes ranked metro areas based on household incomes, costs of living, housing affordability, home ownership, commuting times, crime rates, and local school quality. Lee attended school and participated in organized sports in two of the top 10--Boise, Idaho, and Ogden, Utah.

 

Ogden, Utah, is a great place to live in any season.

Ogden was No. 3 in the rankings. It has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, an excellent spread between incomes and living costs, and great access to outdoor activities. Lee learned to ski nearby; a trip to the mountain slopes was just a few miles from our first home there adjacent to a Wasatch-Cache National Forest boundary. Lee made school friends in Ogden with whom he still stays in touch.

Boise ranked as the seventh best place for families on the Forbes list. Boiseans also enjoy a good income to cost of living ratio and great opportunities for outdoor lifestyles. School quality rated high and the crime rate is low. Several of Lee's early school years were spent in Boise.

 

Boise, Idaho, has a State Capitol and much more to recommend it.

Lee, Sandy, and I conferred today about characteristics of the places we've lived. We agreed the Forbes people got it right with Ogden and Boise. But, because it would be almost impossible to quantify, the raters didn't consider the factor we believe was most important. We all thought the people in those two cities generally were pleasant, thoughtful, and helpful. For us, good people made Ogden and Boise good places to live.

This might lead you to think I was pretty smart about picking places to apply for jobs. Not so.

We had never set foot in Idaho before moving to Boise. The only individual consulted was my sister, who knew a little about the city because her husband worked for Boise-Cascade and they had visited company headquarters a few times. The endorsement was lukewarm at best. Jane's final statement was, "I suppose its OK if you like sagebrush." We made the change simply because it was time for me to move on.

We moved to Ogden strictly to get a Forest Service promotion and the improved income that came with it. Most of the comments I heard before the move were negative, but that was because my boss (who had lived in Ogden earlier) mounted a campaign to convince me not to leave Idaho. Some of it was absurd.

The most imaginative, and least convincing, statement by Boise National Forest Supervisor Ed Maw was, "Those Mormons will steal your horse; then they'll steal your wife."

Well, I didn't own a horse, and Sandy has stayed on as my beautiful wife to this day. We didn't find a lot of bad guys in Utah. What we did find in Ogden, just as we did in Boise, were good neighbors and friends.

A "Flyover Bureaucrat" Lands

It may be hard to believe, but some of the earliest politicians in the U.S. were known to be even more devious than those whose cunning we marvel at today. 

The lack of communications technology made that possible.  A candidate could deliver a speech in one town, take a horse and buggy trip to the next place, and give another speech contradicting his previous words. Without news media, he was unlikely to be caught.  News traveled so slowly that often elections were over before blocs of voters learned they had been duped.

That form of political dishonesty stopped around the end of the nineteenth century, or so we thought.  Telegraph, then telephone, networks made communication swift and reached eventually into every corner of the country.  Large news organizations, such as the Associated Press, linked media.  What a national candidate said in California could be filed by a newspaper reporter and broadcast by a radio station in Massachusetts within minutes.

Today’s politicians may fudge their statements and artfully dodge questions, but they know an outrageous statement made anywhere along the campaign trail will be exposed. They must be more careful than their predecessors about what they say. Or, so we thought.

The Geezer learned of recent campaign rhetoric in Idaho by the Republican candidates that certainly would concern many Americans.  One part of it might have been good for a laugh, something major media like to use to break up dismal news cycles. I’m pretty well tuned into various news sources, yet I heard of the Idaho statements only through a Facebook message from a former fellow employee of the U.S. Forest Service.

The Forest Service manages 20 million acres of National Forest land in Idaho.  Several million of those acres are Congressionally designated Wilderness, priceless wildlands where motorized vehicles are banned and resource extraction largely is prohibited.

Recently, according to the Idaho Statesman, Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Ron Paul proposed selling or transferring the federal lands to private interests or to the state. Mitt Romney got a little more specific. He advocated transferring management of the national forests to states to increase the revenues the lands generate.

There are only a few ways to increase revenues from National Forests.  One is to build roads into what now are roadless Wilderness areas, allow timber cutting there, and encourage mining and grazing, now limited to uses that were grandfathered when the lands were withdrawn from commodity production years ago.  Another is to abandon or seriously relax grazing permit systems and timber harvesting controls on all the lands. These regulations keep yields from the lands sustainable.

Wouldn’t you think millions of Americans would want to know that candidates for president advocated drastic changes in the protection and management of large chunks of our public lands?  Where were our media?  Perhaps they have been so decimated by economic problems that they have no space for such news.  You can bet the Statesman put the story on the wire.

Santorum provided the fodder for comedians.  Speaking to some 3,000 people in Boise, he said: “The federal government doesn’t care about it (Idaho), they don’t care about this land.  They don’t live here, they don’t care about it; we don’t care about it in Washington.  It’s just fly-over country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, DC.”

Shortly thereafter, Tom Tidwell, Chief of the Forest Service, landed in Boise to discuss cooperative planning in Idaho after a flight from his office in Washington, DC. Santorum gave his speech at a rally held at Capital High School in Boise.  Tidwell is a graduate of Capital High School.

Tidwell began his Forest Service career as a fire management specialist for the Boise National Forest.  Later, he served as Regional Forester, the top administrator, for the service's Northern Region, which includes northern Idaho.  We could hardly expect him to know or care much about Idaho, could we?