I can't imagine anyone not liking Riggins.
It's in one of America's best places, at the confluence of the Salmon and Little Salmon rivers directly below the Seven Devils Mountains. And it boasts some of the best outdoor recreation in the Northwest. Whitewater rafting, fishing, hiking and swimming are all within minutes from town, some of them even less.
I've been visiting it and its surroundings since before I moved to Idaho 30 years ago, well before I first dipped my oars in the Salmon or even had oars to dip. My latest visit was last weekend, our annual getaway to hike the Rapid River and enjoy the wildflowers in bloom while higher climes remain brown from winter dormancy.
This year we caught it in even better form than usual, with trilium and Dutchman's breeches competing for the best flowers of the trip, accompanied by most of the other usual suspects: shooting stars, starflowers, larkspur and some whose names we needed the books we left at home to learn. We enjoyed our Saturday hike so much we did it again Sunday, leaving reluctantly because work beckoned.
How strange it was, then, to return to the office and find calls and letters pouring in from Riggins taking offense at the most benign of gibes from the Tribune's Kathy Hedberg.
Hedberg, who lives in the Great White North of Grangeville, so near to and yet so far from the spring warmth of the Salmon River Canyon, writes a weekly humor column. She's also a gardener who, like this Moscow resident, has reason to envy the lengthy growing season Riggins enjoys.
In her Monday column, she played with that envy, joking about how someone in mountainous McCall - where winter lasts from October into June - had referred to Riggins as "the Florida of the North."
"I had to bite my tongue," Hedberg wrote. "Yes, Riggins may have Florida-like weather, I wanted to say. Too bad they drink too much down there to take advantage of it.
"But I'm not petty that way so I kept my mouth shut."
It turns out many of our Riggins readers took her remark seriously, assuming that she is petty that way, and she meant it as an insult. Angry callers and writers told of canceling their Tribune subscriptions and vowing never to read it again.
Good grief.
Is everybody in Riggins so drunk that people can't recognize good-natured humor when they see it?
This kind of reaction is nothing new to experienced newspaper writers, including Hedberg. We have all learned that you can never stick your tongue far enough in your cheek - even until you think you might poke a hole through tissue and emerge on the side of the face - to prevent some readers from taking you seriously.
But Riggins isn't a very big town, and so many readers were enraged by Hedberg's column that I had to wonder if something else wasn't at work.
Besides booze, that is.
I wondered if maybe Rigginsites - Rigginsians? - have lingering soreness about their former school district. That's the consolidated district that was headquartered in Hedberg's frigid hamlet. It seemed no matter what the district did, Riggins residents resented it, certain they were getting the short end of the stick.
Finally, their umbrage boiled over and they split from the mother ship, forming their own school district that will start managing its own affairs as soon as enough of its patrons sober up.
They weren't the first in the region to do so, either. In 2000, patrons of the Whitepine School District voted overwhelmingly to divorce, putting Troy in its own district and the resentful Deary, Bovill and Elk River in another.
Before that happened, a group of Tribune editors visited Deary to hear the same kind of complaints coming out of Riggins. As I recall, it all started when Troy got a new copying machine back in the 1940s and gave its old one to Deary. The district had been like Bosnia and Serbia ever since.
Why, Troy isn't even a community, one woman said. It's just a bedroom community, and for Moscow to boot.
Ordinarily, my advice to people immersed in such corrosive rivalries is to lean back, take a deep breath and relax - and then to invite their antagonists over for a drink. But in this instance, maybe that's not the best course.
Besides, if the meeting were held in Grangeville, I'm not sure anyone there could figure out how to open the bottle.
---
Fisher is editor of the Tribune's editorial page. His e-mail address is jfisher@lmtribune.com.
