Episode 52 | Wallace, ID
There’s a particular kind of morning that a town either has or it doesn’t. The cool air, the smell of a restaurant getting started somewhere nearby, the quiet that isn’t actually silence — it’s just the sound of a place before it’s fully awake. Wallace had it. I was out on the street before the post office opened, walking without much of a plan, and I kept thinking about Paris for no logical reason. The light, maybe. The scale of things. The feeling that the buildings had opinions.
Wallace, Idaho. Population 700. Not Paris. But that morning, not entirely unlike it either.
The Walk Through History
Every building in the downtown area of Wallace is on the National Register of Historic Places. All of them. That’s not a marketing slogan, it’s an actual architectural designation, and when you walk the streets in the early morning you understand how it happened. The storefronts are intact. The brickwork is original. The signage looks like it was designed by someone with a very strong point of view sometime around 1940 and nobody has felt the need to update it since.
I had planned to do some interviews. Frank had been telling me for a while that the videos needed more conversations with locals, and Wallace seemed like the right place to try it. Everybody I passed looked like they had a story worth hearing.
What happened instead was better than an interview.
I noticed a couple sitting on their porch across the street from the post office. I’d nodded to them on an earlier pass and something about the way the man looked up made me cross the street. We talked for about fifteen or twenty minutes. His name was Ron, and he had an Army Reserves hat on and had spent time at a base in the area that had been converted into a hotel. He knew this part of Idaho the way people know places they’ve stayed in long enough to watch it change. We talked about the town, about what I was doing, about the area. He and his wife were genuinely curious about the project.
I didn’t get the camera out. I was just there, talking to people, which is what I came out here to do. I’m getting better at it. I’m also still learning when to stop talking and just ask questions. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation I caught myself steering the narrative instead of following it. That’s the thing to fix. You’re there to learn, not to demonstrate what you already know.
Donna and the Puzzle
Donna runs the Ryan Hotel, which is where I stayed. She was generous with her time and genuinely proud of the town, which turns out to be well-earned pride. Wallace doesn’t have the feeling of a place that’s been preserved for tourists. It has the feeling of a place that just never let go of what it was.
Donna had commissioned an artist named Greg Visentainer to create a puzzle depicting Wallace — the depot, the Ryan Hotel itself, the Dante’s Peak connection, the mining history, the Elks Lodge, all of it worked into one image. She showed it to me and I filmed part of it. I’ll share what I have.
But here’s the part I want to land properly.
I’d asked Greg to include a train somewhere in the design. It was a casual request, just a detail that felt right for a town with a railroad history. When the piece came back, the train he’d drawn was the same one that sat on my dad’s desk when he passed away. Same look, same style, same feeling. I don’t know how to explain that other than to say it happened, and I stood there looking at it for longer than I’d planned.
My dad’s middle name was Wallace. (she then said)
I’m not a person who attaches a lot of significance to coincidences as a rule. But some of them you just let sit.
Bumbling Through
On the way out of Wallace I drove back toward Coeur d’Alene for a couple of scenic drives I’d found along the river and the lake, because the alternative was heading to Bozeman early and I didn’t see the point in that. I have a flight tomorrow midday. Everything between now and then is negotiable.
That’s the part of this project I keep coming back to. The bumbling. I’ve got the domain name and everything — Bumbling Through America — bought on a whim months ago when I was thinking about what comes after 50 at 60. Maybe that’s the next chapter. Maybe you make a deliberate plan and see what it costs you. Maybe you drive back to Coeur d’Alene for a scenic road because nobody told you not to.
I’m not sure I get the most out of a trip this way. But I’m not sure I’d want the other version.
