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© 2004 Chad Case, Idaho Stock Images Introduction Essay for Idaho 24/7 Here We Have Idaho By Gregory Hahn Silver Creek's glassy flow smudges in the breeze, while the browns and rainbows that frustrated Hemingway bunch together in the gentle eddies just behind the fisherman. They dart out to snatch unseen meals, but rarely go for the fisherman's fly. Still, he stands in the creek as it turns obsidian with the dusk. He listens to the cries of the sandhill cranes and keeps casting. Above him, the foothills roll brown all the way to the Sawtooths. Idaho is grander and more dramatic than the stories describe, and the spring-clear flow of Silver Creek is just a glimpse. To the north, the Main Fork of the Salmon-the "River of No Return"-runs through the largest plot of wild lands in the Lower 48. The wilderness was carved out and protected by U.S. Senators Frank Church and James McClure, political enemies who shared little but a love for their state. Here are the Owyhee and Snake River canyons; five Native American tribes: Coeur d'Alene, Nez Perce, Shoshone, Bannock, and Shoshone-Paiute; and the tree-lined, turn-of-the-century neighborhoods in Boise's North End. Idahoans are wounded every time a timber mill closes or commodity prices drop; to a degree, we are still lodged in the past, when silver mines were strong and stable, and potato production outpaced everything else. But now, the grandchildren of miners and farmers cannot find work in rural towns. Many of the old ag settlements survive off the giant dairy farms that migrated this way from California. These days, Idaho makes far more money from milk than from its "famous" spuds. Here is a place where a guy like J.R. Simplot, in his 90's and still kicking, can make millions in french fries and then billions more by investing in two local kids who had a plan to start something called Micron Technology. We are a state of conservatives, in just about every sense of the word, but our Republican-dominated Legislature said no to cuts in public education spending and no to a Ten Commandments display inside the statehouse. We live in gritty mining towns like Challis and Kellogg and dusty farm towns like Rupert and Burley or Boise's lush and bustling river valley, where steelhead swim past high-tech campuses. We play in the rapids of the Lochsa and the Payette, on the banks of high mountain lakes, and sometimes in the swanky ski hills at Sun Valley. Idahoans are uniting to keep our White Cloud Mountains and Owyhee Canyons pristine-and, more basically, to maintain our way of life. We are looking ahead. We keep going back to Silver Creek, now protected as a Nature Conservancy preserve. We tie new flies. We've got a simple sense of place and identity summed up in the short refrain of the state song, a fond anthem unusual in its popularity. "Here," sing the grade-schoolers and the Rotarians and the lawmakers, "we have Idaho." GREGORY HAHN is an award-winning reporter for the Idaho Statesman newspaper in Boise. Browse    View All    "Here We Have Idaho"    Hearth & Home    Hard at Work    Idaho at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 125 Photographers: 29 Towns: 57

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