Word: ketchum
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Briggs and I had planned to get out of Ketchum early Sunday morning. Instead we went to watch the girls play softball down at the Ernest Hemingway Elementary School. They were big and beautiful and inspired us into getting some beer. So we headed to the market, running into Daniel and Gay and Daniel's tow-headed friends from back home. Bridget and Jenny, on the way. They weren't as big nor quite as beautiful, but we were in a fit mood to be inspired so Daniel's invitation to go down to the river and smoke...
Well things didn't really get hot till we got out to Pegleg Mac's. About an hour and a half from Ketchum, down in the valley on the far side of snow-towered Galena Pass, is Pegleg's spread: some pint-sized log cabins, a twin-holer outhouse, a good bit of fence, and the hot springs. We hadn't come to admire the fence...
...look for 6-10, a Park Ranger who went to school with Fred. The Park Service people live in a ratty cove of mobile homes parked on a patch of mud and gravel. Out of a faded beige unit, Briggs, Fred's exroommate and my future roommate in Ketchum, steps. He's broken up with his girlfriend so he hitched up from Ketchum--about seven hours away--to do some fishing. The streams are high and muddy, and the trout few, 6-10 gets off patrol at midnight; we drive to a hot spring near Mammoth. Over the thermal source...
After three pitchers of beer, Briggs and I drive to Ketchum that night. Fred sleeps in the back. It is a long, desert road. Cars are few and I trace their rear lights back to nothing in the sideview mirror, where they are but a pin-pricked rupture in the great sack of night, a bleeding stream of fleeting electricity. I push the van to 95 in the soundless onrush of blackness, while the flourescent stakes by the roadside teeter rearward and empty lights hang nowhere out in the desert, some mystery of some nuclear facility...
...arrived at Briggs' and my shack in Ketchum. The day dawned rainy and grey in Sun Valley. For the next five days it stayed rainy and grey. In a field in front of Fred's apartment, the elk head lies as Fred ponders how to cure...