Potato Grower

4 POTATO GROWER | IDAHO ANNUAL 2017 Between the Rows Playing for the Same Team We may have our differences, but they're not that important This past summer, I made the trek back to my childhood home in Oakley for our little town's Pioneer Days celebration. I'm hardly the only one to make the pilgrimage; for one weekend every July, Oakley balloons from a tiny hamlet of 700-odd residents into a teeming metropolis to rival Kimberly and American Falls in scope and size. There are rodeos, fireworks, a deep-pit barbecue, church events, a parade, the almost-famous Goose Creek Run-Off, and a hundred family and class reunions. My primary reason for making the three-hour pilgrimage this year, though, was to play in the annual three-on-three basketball tournament with my brother, who had managed to rope a high school buddy and our dad into playing with us. Teams in this particular tourney exist in varying degrees of mediocrity, but, for the most part, win or lose, everyone understands what they are and simply has a good time. There is one team, however, that participates every year and who everyone (and I mean everyone) just hates to play. It's made up of two brothers a few years older than I and usually a brother-in-law or teenage nephew. This isn't their real name, but for our purposes we'll call them the Allens. The Allen brothers are enormously competitive, with which I have no issue. The problem is that their competitiveness is borne out in ticky-tack foul calls, arguing, whining and shady scorekeeping. The Allens have lived in Oakley for generations, and the family is nothing if not a credit to the community. They are a hardworking, generous, upstanding family—the very best kind of people. These ball-playing brothers are no exception. But, man, do they suck the fun out of basketball. As luck would have it, Team Marchant wound up pitted against Team Allen this year in an elimination game. Immature as it is, I could not stand the thought of losing to the Allens, and neither could the rest of my team. For a game that my rational mind knew full well didn't matter one iota, let me tell you, fellers, this one mattered. With the talent and fitness levels more or less equal, the game was pretty tight, with all the typical whining and faux rage attendant every time the Allens touch a ball. For the most part, I kept my composure and acted like a grownup, but when my brother nailed a three-pointer that put us up 20-18 (in a game to 21), a primal "YEEEESSSSSSSSSS!!!" erupted involuntarily from my throat. We did eventually win our game against the Brothers Allen, then shook their hands and were then promptly annihilated by a team of way-too-nice high schoolers. But that loss didn't matter; we had eliminated the Allens from the tournament, and that alone made the drive worth it. An old friend from high school even caught up to us on the way out of the gym with a huge grin on his face. "I don't care if you take second-to-last place," he told us, "if you put the Allens out, you're the most important team here." Yes sir, we were illogically, undeniably proud of ourselves. Victory is sweet, and we subsisted on it the rest of that day. The next day, though, as I reminisced on what we had deemed to be a monumental victory, I became a little ashamed at my behavior. Here I was, a grown man, basking in the glow of a win in a three-on-three tournament in Oakley freaking Idaho, for which the championship trophy was a screen-printed T-shirt. To make myself feel even more guilty, I realized I wasn't even reveling in our triumph as much as in the Allens' defeat. My smug satisfaction bordered on despicable. The Allens are good people, working hard to raise good families. I knew that; I always had. Warts and all, they certainly hadn't done anything to deserve my disdain and antipathy. What the Marchants have in common with the Allens is worth far more than our differences in an utterly inconsequential basketball game. We're all royal sons of Oakley, after all. That same kind of tie binds Idaho potato growers together. A neighbor's lazy fungicide application may mean some white mold spreads to your field, the lot where his cellars are may be an overgrown junkyard, and his kid may drive his old Civic way too fast past your house. But on a fundamental level, you are very much the same: Idahoans. It's awesome to meet a fellow Idahoan in, say, Chicago, tell him where you're from, and hear him ask, "Oakley…is that 2T?" "Nah," you reply, "4C," both of you reveling in the secret language of the license plate. It's an immediate connection, and it's real. Fitting that most pervasive Idaho stereotype—that of being a potato grower— takes the connection to another level. Regardless of what kind of blowhards or bumblers or know-it-alls other growers may be, the fact that they are fellow Idaho potato growers rises above the rest. Being a part of something like that, my friends, is a win. These were good people, working hard to raise good families. Warts and all, they certainly hadn't done anything to deserve my disdain and antipathy.

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