There's No Place Like Home

After I graduated from high school I went on a school trip to Costa Rica. We spent ten days touring the country. We spent time deep in the rain forest (and I mean deep: it took an hour by boat to get up the river to the town where we stayed), we went to the middle of the country in what is known as the Arenal region, we went to Monteverde and then we ended up on the Pacific side to spend two days on the beach.

It was a fantastic trip. I had a lot of fun and I really liked being exposed to a different culture. And it was beautiful. 

A few days after I came back, my family went on a camping trip to a place about two hours from our house. As we were driving, I realized that as beautiful as Costa Rica was, I still thought those mountains, the ones I had grown up in, were more beautiful. 

When I was younger, I wanted to write stories that were set in places like New York, France, and England. I have never been to any of those places. I used to want to leave but in the past few years I've begun to realize that the Northwest is my home. This is where my roots are.

Black and Gold is set in a fictional place that didn't exist until I made it up in my head. But it is real to me. The places there look like places I have been in Idaho, Washington and California. 

Idaho is beautiful to me. I seen a lot of it when I drive home from school. I love the mountains, the rivers that rage white in the summer and flow between frozen snowbanks in the winter. I love the rolling farmland of the Palouse. I love the sagebrush and the tall grass that decorate the southern desert and the foothills of Boise. I love it all.

People give Idaho a lot of grief, calling it Iowa and what not. Some of my native Boiseans make the distinction between being from 'Idaho' and being from 'Boise', as if the latter separates them from the stereotypical Idahoan. But I don't care. I am from Idaho. 

This love of place is something my characters share. It is not just their country that they love but the land itself. Both find it beautiful.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: if you love your home, don't be ashamed. Write about it. There is no better writing material than authentic experience and you experience your home in a way you don't experience a distant city. 

Here are a few pictures I've taken of Idaho:

No place is perfect. Idaho has a winter that holds on longer than we think it should. It has a summer that ends with an August that roasts in the triple digits or suffocates us with the smoke of forest fires. It has trouble making up its mind what kind of weather any given hour will have. But it's home.