Idaho is a stunningly beautiful state. It's landscape varies from desert to rolling meadows to rugged mountains, with scores of pristine lakes and raging mountain rivers. Idaho is home to some of the country's best white water rafting, fishing, skiing and hunting. It is a land still unmolested by development, but word is starting to get out. As the popularity of Colorado continues to explode, I'm sure that many would-be Colorado transplants will start to work their way into Idaho, buying land and building deluxe resorts. It has started already.

Sixty miles from Oxbow in the Payette National Wilderness, I rolled into the small town of Council. It was 6:00 and I was thirsty, hungry and had to pee, so I stopped at the general store on Main Street. Finished with my business in the store, I came out to my bike to pack my food and make adjustments to my bike. The handlebar bag was shimmying and making an annoying rattle for the last 20 miles, so I needed to perform a little duct tape surgery to rectify the situation. As I was taping up my bike, the checkout girl came outside to empy the trash can by the front door, then to throw the bag in the dumpster behind the building.

While she was around back, an old Dodge pickup truck pulled up, complete with mud flaps, gun rack, cantelope-sized rust holes, and a fishing pole and a tackle box in the back. The engine turned off before the truck rolled to a halt when it hit the cement parking lot stopper thing, and out hopped the driver. He was wearing snake skinned boots, a leather cowboy hat, black t-shirt, freshly pressed, bright blue Wrangler jeans with a black leather belt and a shinny silver belt buckle. A tin of Copenhagen was nestled snug in his left back pocket as well as a healthy sized pinch between his cheek and gum. Upon exiting the car, he spit and a brown stream of saliva, as if discharged from a Super-Soaker, splattered on the ground several feet from where he was standing. This man had obviously been practicing his form.

The man headed straight to the dumpster behind the building where the checkout girl was emptying the trash. His walk was slow and somewhat labored as though he was carrying watermelons between his legs. He disappeared behind the building, but I could here him spit again then ask "why you been ignoring me?"

"I ain't ignored you," she answered obviously disturbed to be bothered by this western Casanova.

"Then why you been avoidin' me?"

"Have not, just haven't seen you for a few days."

"Or picked up the phone." The checkout girl then walked around the corner and towards the front door. Billy the Kid followed. "I thought we were working on something special."

The checkout girl turned around to look at her suitor "don't know if I'd call a few nights special."

"I thought so. I came by the other day to see if you wanted to go fishin', but they said you weren't around." The checkout girl, now back in the store, closed the front door behind her, but after another geyser-like spit, the cowboy followed. I really wanted to go inside to buy some popcorn and sit around to see how the love story ended, but I had many more miles to travel.

Following my Discovery Channel moment in Council, I continued north on route 95 towards New Meadows. When I was in college, I lived with a guy named Bill Bucher my freshman and junior years. Bill was from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, the same town as my college, and loved the small town country living of rural Pennsylvania. To this day, whenever I think of hunting, fishing, chewing tobacco and drinking beer, I think of Bill. We had a lot of fun together.

A few weeks into our freshman year, the idea of growing up in such a small rural town was becoming intriguing to me. I just couldn't figure out what the high school kids did for fun, so I asked. Bill thought for a minute then said, "well, sometimes we go corning."

Thoroughly baffled, I responded "Corning? What the hell is corning?"

"Well, during Fall when the corn is fully grown, we drive out to the fields and take a few ears of corn off the stalks, then pull the kernels off the cob into a bag. Then we drive around and throw the corn at street signs and houses with aluminum siding."

"And...?" This still wasn't making any sense to me.

"And it makes a real loud noise, then we drive off."

"This is fun?"

"A blast." So the next night we gathered a group of about ten of us, loaded two cars, drove into the fields, took some corn, shucked it, and proceeded to drive around town "corning." And it was a "blast."