There’s a flavor of humor in Idaho that is hard to define. It’s not salty. Well, no, I guess it can be salty. But it’s not dry. Then again, I guess it can also be dry, really dry. But it’s definitely not bitter – though at times it might sting a bit. The best way I can describe it is that no one laughs. The humor settles in best if no one even acknowledges that it’s there, running like a current underneath the surface of any given situation. It’s understatement taken to the level of hardly existing – sort of like a bottle of infused water that almost tastes like something but never really gets there. I hate that kind of water, but I love that kind of humor.
Maybe the best way to explain what I mean is through a few examples. Of course, every time a joke is explained, it’s not so funny anymore, but here I go, probably ruining everything. There was that one time, for example, when I was at the fair. My oldest two kids were showing steers, and I was nine months pregnant. Nine months plus. Nine months plus one fair, two toddlers, one 7-year-old MIA and 500 miles of pulling a wagon around the fairgrounds. Three or four fun days in, I was making my slow and lumbering way into the beef barn when a steer came running out the entrance. He was as free as a jaybird and apparently late to an appointment somewhere down the fairway. I jumped out of his way as gracefully as I could – considering my circumference, it was more of a sideways roll – and the steer headed straight for who knows where. Of course, my neighbor just happened to be standing nearby and saw everything. Leaning on the barn, unphased in the midst of all the commotion, he looked as calm as a summer’s day. “Michele,” he said, “you know that actually works better if you jump in front of the steer.” Now that I think about it 14 years later, I’m not sure if he was actually funny or he just thought he was. The great pregnancy leap didn’t send me into labor, so a story is all I got out of the situation.
Then there’s my father-in-law and my chickens. As my children will tell you, I am a mother hen in all regards: personality, paranoia, scatterbrainedness. Most to the point, I cannot eat my own chickens. It’s a situation that’s incomprehensible to my father-in-law. To his credit, when he comes over he doesn’t directly address the shame of feeding 4-year-old chickens. He just gives me culinary advice, as if I’m on the verge of making soup for dinner. “Michele, I think those birds are going to need a solid four hours of boiling before you’re going to be able to eat them.” The older my chickens get, the longer the boiling time gets. It would serve Dad right if I actually served him some geriatric chicken soup, but he knows he’s safe.
You may not be aware, but the art of the long-running, never-ending, understated joke was actually perfected in Idaho. Northern Idaho, to be precise. While Dave was in school, I worked as a bookkeeper in a building supply store. The office manager was a northern Idaho hunter, which is the same thing as saying he was crazy. Hunting is the same as breathing up there and, of course, there’s no such thing as seasonal breathing. Dan (names have been changed to protect the guilty) earned his own small amount of sportsman fame by shooting a buck one season. Well, it wasn’t a buck exactly, though it looked an awful lot like one. It might have actually been a Fish and Game decoy. And maybe he shot it in a season that wasn’t exactly deer season. Thus the decoy. But the bait was by all appearances a beautiful prize, and when he saw it, Dan didn’t waste a minute in taking it down, which might have meant that he jumped out of his car and began shooting at it from the highway. Repeatedly. He was a pretty good shot, but the buck mysteriously wouldn’t go down, so he kept at it like a John Wayne character in the middle of a showdown. Things went downhill for him from there. Fish and Game personnel magically appeared to introduce themselves, and everyone involved got to know one another real well. Maybe all parties would have come to a friendly understanding, my manager being a personable person who firmly believed in the motto of live and let live, but the officers couldn’t leave well enough alone and went and found a poached turkey in his trunk.
Dan earned himself a complimentary article in a Fish and Game publication. To be fair, how could he not? I myself am not a dedicated reader of in-agency Fish and Game publications but, unfortunately for Dan, someone on staff at the lumber store was. Leastways, the article got into the hands of the oldest and most nefarious store employee, Earl. And the long joke began.
Thereafter, without warning, a grainy copy of Dan’s article would appear on his desk. Then another one would mysteriously turn up as part of the agenda at a management meeting. Copies would be posted by the OSHA posters on the company bulletin board. Then suddenly, as if the copy machine had broken, all would go silent for months. Just about the time everyone was forgetting the “incident” had ever happened, bing, another copy of the article would appear taped to the breakroom microwave. It was just a friendly little reminder to Dan “that this-will-never-ever-die. Ever.” And to my memory, no one ever laughed or said a word about the joke at all. Sometimes you just can’t touch perfection.
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