*
The next day, Martin and I headed off toward Boise. We decided to drive four hours to Idaho Falls, where we stayed with Martin’s old student and his pregnant wife; they are ranchers. Here they are cooking:
Here are the beautiful plains by their ranch the next day:
Here is a picture of The Craters of the Moon, which we passed on our way from Idaho Falls (bastion of McCain support and population of inveterate smokers) to Boise; we took the scenic route:
As you can see there was all kinds of weather.
Boise itself was another sort of quickie: I got into town with Martin at about 5, we went to the post office to send some things back to New York, grabbed a bite, and I read. I was the only reader, it was Election Day—tough bill to fill. Right before I stepped into the auditorium, Ohio was announced for Obama; right afterwards, Virginia. The reading itself was great—a really good turnout, maybe 30 or 40 people… I opened the reading with an especially political William Carlos Williams poem my friend Caroline Crumpacker sent around earlier in the day.
It was nuts to be in a red state all day. After the reading, a bunch of us went out to a bar. McCain gave his concession speech, but only about a third of the people in the bar seemed excited. Not just a red state, a red bar:
Martin and I then got a bottle of wine and watched Obama speak on the TV at Martin’s house—wonderful, drunk. I thought the little frolicking sort of moment at the start of things when his family came out was cute—happy wife and kids. The speech was great—conciliatory, thoughtful, intellectual, really. He is literally an idealist. It’s nice to have a president who acts neither like a rock star nor like a cowboy. In a way he seems more like a child—pre-sexual, pre-cynical, preternaturally beneficent and fair. Here’s Obama:
Goodbye beautiful conservative smoking Boise.
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