Yesterday I had the unique privilege of going to our department staff meeting. Usually whenever our department has any kind of meeting (or party) I get stuck on the phones. So, like I said, yesterday I had a unique privilege. Adding to the singularity of this event, it was not just any old regular department meeting, but a retreat to the family cabin of one of my co-workers, located a few miles outside of Preston, Idaho. It turns out that Preston is kind of a long way to drive from Salt Lake just for a four hour meeting and lunch, but it was on work time, I didn’t have to drive, and I usually enjoy road trips to obscure locales. Also, I didn’t really feel like going up the night before and staying over without my wife for the more “retreat” portion of the itinerary.
Beyond the fact that I was getting paid and hanging out with the cool kids, Preston actually turned out to be a very pleasant and beautiful little place. Between what I’d seen of Southern Idaho from driving on I-84 and my impressions of Preston as it is portrayed in a little indie flick you may or may not remember from a few years back, I had kind of low expectations. So I was surprised. Preston shares the pastoral Cache Valley with Logan, Utah, and it’s possible it may actually have the prettier end of it. The aforementioned family cabin was nestled in rolling mountain foothills next to a nice little reservoir. The area is pretty much an all-american idyllic landscape. I can still smell the hay just thinking about the drive to get there. I’m really wishing I had gotten my camera out and tried to take some pictures, because now I have a head full of barns, rolling hills, tractors, old small town main street storefronts, and brown/purple mountain ranges in all directions.
It was hard not to feel the pressure of one the great cult comedies of my generation weighing down on me as we drove through town. I felt that perhaps I somehow diminished or stereotyped the town and its good people by hoping for them to conform to my “Hollywood” expectations. And yet despite such moral misgivings I persisted in my fantasies. When some of my co-workers were about to go golfing at the close of our meeting day, I suggested that perhaps tetherball would be a more appropriate recreational activity. I searched storefronts for the famous Deseret Industries thrift store, where in the past such incomparable treasures as nun-chucks, a dance instruction VHS published in 1982, and a really swank polyester suit had been found. I was tempted to ask the waitress at Pizza Villa, where we ate lunch, if I could have an order of tater tots. (They have pretty good pizza, by the way.) I kept my eyes open for a llama. Over the years I have seen llamas in so many small towns throughout Utah that they have ceased to be very remarkable to me, and yet in Preston I inexplicably kept my eyes open for a llama. Behind each grassy knoll we passed I expected to see a camper van parked and perhaps a mustachioed man throwing a football into the fields for a camcorder. As we pulled out of town and started driving south, I truly felt kind of ashamed for my pathetic, touristy behavior in regards to this place.
Since I didn’t have any pictures of Preston to take home with me, I decided to turn to flickr to fulfill my visual needs. To my surprise I discovered that a good portion of the photos tagged ‘preston idaho’ on flickr pertain directly to scene locales of the allegedly abominable film. Looking through the images, you will see the school steps upon which a boy drew a liger in a notepad, the house of Pedro, the Rex Kwan Do center, and so on, and so on. You will also occasionally see glimpses of that idyllic landscape I was talking about. Upon further research in the sacrosanct annals of Wikipedia, I discovered that Preston has fully embraced this humble motion picture as the central mythos of their town, as it has given rise to an annual grand celebration. A schedule of events from 2006 indicates a literary/media-inspired ritual that could come to rival even Dublin’s Bloomsday, complete with bus tours of significant filming sites, a moon boot dance contest and tater tot eating contest, and numerous performances by the Happy Hands Club. I now feel somewhat relieved and vindicated in looking at the environs of Preston through the eyes of Napoleon‘s storytellers. After all, it is not many towns of less than 5,000 residents that are so honored and immortalized with such a sweet film. I wouldn’t be too surprised if that waitress had brought me out some tater tots without a second’s question if I’d actually asked for them.
Prestonidaho.org – Preston, Idaho Chamber of Commerce Home Page
Photos Taken in Preston, Idaho – flickr.com
Napoleon Dynamite – official site