Revealing

I take walks about every day, and every day I see something cool. When I travel, especially when I travel alone, I forgo the overprices tourist tickets and go walking. I have stumbled upon private museums, historic landmarks, and housing projects this way. I always find myself delighted with a personal impression of where I am.
I am still discovering the place I live. Lewiston Idaho is a small isolated city in a valley, which I understand to actually be a canyon, at the bottom of the panhandle of Idaho, at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers. So there's not much here.
We don't even have a Target, I tell people, as if the presence of a discount retailer makes a place a something. We don't have a Hooters-you can't find fried pickles anywhere.
Of course all the sameness of the shameless strips of commerce across America don't make a place a place. Yes, every Crapplebees has the same menu, and you can count on that when you travel and that idyllic sameness is comforting in contrast to the disorientation and dissonance of trying to get somewhere. After all, the destination is ahead, and where the hell are you anyway?
I wonder.