CUSTER COUNTY, ID

In Custer County, Idaho, we believed that “We are what America Used to Be”.

I lived along Hwy 75, in the carcass of the Great American Frontier. In Custer County, you met neighbours who were both alive and dead. As much as we talked of Willy-Earl, the town tow-truck driver, we also retold the legend of Buckskin Bill, the last known mountain man. Our town was a 100-mile museum made of ghosts and flesh, a collection of stories.

Mid-summer, on the other side of the Sawtooth Mountains, a contractor paid a cement-truck to speed twice daily through our town. A lavish swimming pool was being chiseled into the heart of the Rocky Mountains.

Some nights, at the street dance, or in the hills, we would talk about the cement-truck. Whereas Willy-Earl drove slowly around the curves of the highway, towing rafts, foam, and rope, the cement-truck seemed unstoppable under its own weight. Contempt for the swimming pool increased with the twice-daily passing of the cement-truck. For weeks, we did not swap tales of Lewis & Clarke’s legendary lost shotgun, we gossiped of the pool. The constant chatter pushed our ghosts out of town; but they would return.

At 9:14am on July 17th, the cement truck crossed the centre line of Hwy 75 on the way to the pool. The driver was ejected from the truck. Willy-Earl found the crushed engine and the driver’s body twisted and submerged in the rapids. No one saw the cement truck roll into the river, but we all drove past.

We were not shocked. Cement-trucks had come before, only in different forms. The license plate was hung like a souvenir at the local saloon, the Rod n’ Gun — it sits next to a photo of “The Group of Three”, a band of locals who allegedly blew-up the Sunbeam Dam in 1934. Like many times before, the town swallowed the cement-truck — we made it a ghost, a story we told ourselves.