DAY 33 - Arco, ID - 651 miles from home

Esther Lisa Tishman
Aug 6
4 min read

Updated: Aug 7

I'm writing this on August 6th, the morning of Day 34, as I sit and cool my heels by the Arco fairgrounds - just next to a plaque that commemorates "Atoms For Peace." It's weird to be writing these words today. Exactly eighty years ago, we dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima.

Here in Arco, about a decade after Little Boy - on July 17, 1955 - the lights of Arco were lit for one hour by nuclear power, demonstrating for the first time in the history of the world "the peaceful use of atomic power." The National Reactor Testing Station, now known as the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), produced the energy for this experiment. INL is located in the desert just southeast of Arco. Juanita - our supremely generous and kind host for the night - worked at INL for years. Today she's a grandma of prize-winning 4H kids (congratulations to the girls who just fared really well with their sheep at the Idaho Falls fair), a leather worker (beautiful purses), a future Camino walker, a hiker and rider and climber and more. She and her aussiedoodle pup Clara, five chickens, and horses - Lena and Fancy - live just outside of town on a ranch too heart-openingly beautiful for words. My pictures didn't capture it either. (Juanita - truly - Oregon is beautiful too! Sometime after November 30th - come on that Pacific Northwest road trip with Tena!)

But yesterday was also about my feet. I have bunions, people. Have had them since high school - a result (I'm told) of my longer-than-normal first metatarsal bones. Or something like that. Anyway - foot care is a huge part of this pilgrimage for me. Because I have almost no flex in my big toes, my feet pronate, I get blisters and callouses in weird places, my second toes cross over my big toes, and generally: my feet look terrible and get roughed up in all sorts of ways all the time. They don't hurt, actually... or not much. But they annoy me. AND - over the past decade I've developed a synovial cyst on my right foot, just below the proximal phalanx of the great toe. Fascinating, I know. Even more fascinating: over the past few weeks this cyst has ballooned up with more fluid.

What's a pilgrim to do? My fabulous brother-in-law Neal encouraged me to see a podiatrist and although Arco, Idaho has a population of less than 1000, it also has a really fine medical center - with a podiatrist on staff. And so, that's how I ended up at Lost Rivers Medical Center where I got numbed up, aspirated, expressed (lots of good cyst goo) and bandaged.

Lost Rivers Medical Center! What a joyous and kind place - the sort of center you would want all small communities to have, but in fact, this is the only facility like it within 70 miles. Robin, the receptionist, kept me laughing and smiling. She made much of the 650 miles I'd walked, even phoning the local news station. "They should cover your story!" - Oh, and then at just the right, low-blood-sugar moment - she appeared in the examining room doorway and gave me a mini bundt cake. Bobbie - the incredible nurse (thank you, Bobbie, for squeezing my leg to distract me from all the needles) - brought me water. Dr. Tomlinson, the podiatrist, took such good care of me, in spite of his full load of patients - taking his time with my sorry feet, explaining every part of the process.

This is Idaho, so nobody tried to tell me to stop hiking. Of course I'd be back on the road tomorrow. Dr. Tomlinson made sure that the bandages weren't too bulky for my sneakers. Bobbie dropped some extra packages of Betadine and Neosporin into my goodie bag ("these can go into your backpack"), and Dr. Redd - the clinic's ER doc and generalist - shared stories of treating other hikers - for example, the one who walked into the clinic at Driggs with grizzly bites. "The mama bear grabbed him by the leg and it was too hard to play dead, so he made as much noise as he could and scared her. She threw him up in the air and left!"

This morning, my foot sort of stings - but I'll be on the road soon.