Idaho Falls

62 IDAHO FALLS MAGAZINE JANUARY 2018 Out There by Gregg Losinski The numbers on a calendar or odometer are little more than fi gures arranged to help us create an understand- ing of where something stands in time. The problem is that they're actual meaning is often hidden and if we trust them at face value we could be in for a surprise. A few years ago our family purchased a used car from someone here in Idaho Falls. Because it had low mileage and was fairly new we thought we got a pretty fair deal. What the person who sold us the car failed to let us know was that even though it had low mileage, they were brutal miles hauling oil fi eld workers and the transmission was on the verge of exploding. Driving around town for a test drive was no problem, but when one of my sons loaded up the car for college he only made it as far as American Falls before needing to be towed back. Conversely, when my grandfather died we inherited his 13-year-old car. Since he lived in Chicago and rode the bus to work every day, the car had low miles and even though it was old it was in great shape because it had always been stored in the garage. The moral of the story is you can't tell much by just looking at the age of something, you need to also look at how it has been treated along the way. All three of our sons attended Idaho Falls High School and while they all have fond memories, none of them would consider it such a gem that it must be treasured and maintained forever. Memories can only take you so far and when students are constantly packed like sardines in strange spaces under the bleachers, it's time to buck up and vote for a facility better able to meet the needs of our students. Facilities that get used spo- radically like the newly renamed Idaho Falls Civic Center for the Performing Arts can be updated and still be useful, but for some- thing expected to meet the needs of over a thousand students daily, you can only dress up a sow's ear for so long. On a recent trip to Japan as a guest of the Japan National Parks to teach about bears, I had the good fortune to be seated at a dinner with a junior science teacher who spoke a little English. As we chatted, with Google translator fi lling in the gaps, it came out that he loved Cutthroat Trout, which is weird because cutties aren't native to Japan. As we delved further into our international dialogue over some sake, he asked me where I came from in Idaho. Since few people in the USA, let alone Japan know where Idaho Falls is located, my standard answer is that I come from a town near Yellowstone National Park. Just about everybody in the world knows about Yellowstone. In this case, he pressed me harder. I said we even have a river with cutthroats and his eyes started to grow larger. When I said I came from Idaho Falls, he burst into a huge smile and started to shake my hand like crazy! Turns out, he was raised in Tokai, our sister city in Japan! He could hardly contain himself when he described with rapture how somehow a sister city delegation forty years ago had circumvented international agricultural import laws to bring Idaho spuds to his vil- lage. Forty years later he could still describe how incredible our Idaho russets tasted with melted butter. When I gave him my last Idaho spud pin I knew I had developed a friend for life! Forty years is a pretty long time and a lot of miles, but the experience of a young boy in Japan tasting one of our famous potatoes transcended four decades! It just goes to show you that sometimes the years don't mean squat, it's how you savor the miles along the way. It 's Not Always The Years, Sometimes It's The Miles IF

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