They did, in late 2016, buying six acres, uprooting their lives, and having a small house built and delivered to their new home. And they discovered that, if there ever was a good time for two urbanities (and their dog) with typically urban careers - one of them a brown-skinned man with a big beard and a "foreign" name - to move to the most deeply conservative and xenophobic part of the country, near the end of the 2016 election season was somewhat more...problematic.
This Country tells the story of their three years on that land, from their first night in a tent through their efforts at farming and fertility struggles, until they decided to go live somewhere else. And, I should say, the locals were definitely friendly, in their way. They gave advice, generally useful and often blunt. They asked Mahdavian politely if he was a Muslim, and generally seem to have assumed that, if he was, he was one of the good ones. They treated Mahdavian and his wife much like they treated everyone else. They included him in their paranoid conversations about secret ISIS training camps nearby. Some of them became personal friends, and all of them were helpful, in that way people have in thinly-populated areas where any crisis must be handled by whoever's already there. They felt comfortable enough to throw around major slurs when talking to him. They encouraged vegetarian Mahdavian to go hunting with them.
What they didn't do - and Mahdavian doesn't say this outright - is adjust the way they thought and acted and spoke the tiniest bit ever, at any time, when interacting with Mahdavian and his wife. And that, as anyone othered in any context can attest, is exhausting.
That could be one marker of liberal vs. conservative, I suppose: the cartoon version is that liberals bend over backwards to "include" others, no matter what convolutions they have to go through from moment to moment in doing so, while conservatives refuse to change anything about themselves ever, gleefully doubling-down on their worst aspects and making those the core of their personalities.
On the other hand, rural Idaho is thinly populated. Mahdavian could go days without seeing anyone other than his wife. It was gorgeous, and it gave them three years to live on and be part of their own land - seeing the seasons pass, learning the local animals, working hard to make raised beds and try to grow their own food. (It didn't work: I think that never works, for individuals trying it in Year One. You can only grow food to live on on the first try if you're supported in a community that already knows how.) It was lovely, and Mahdavian and his wife would have been happy to stick it out there, among the locals who didn't mean to be rude and racist, and spend their lives there.
But they also wanted to raise a family. In the last section of this book, we see their fertility problems, and the treatments they went through. And that struggle led to the reason they decided to leave Idaho. I probably shouldn't blatantly tell you, since that's as close to "spoiling" the ending as a cartoon non-fiction memoir can get, but it did have to do with their desire for a family, and what it would mean to have a family in that place, among those people.
Mahdavian tells this story quietly, in soft tones. His people have dot eyes but expressive faces. His landscapes stretch out across the page, to show the attractiveness of this land. He balances showing us their lives and telling us about it well - looking back, I think of this book as mostly not narrated, but, looking through pages, there are captions all over the place. But they don't intrude; they don't tell us things that we can see - they set the scene or give context or explain the non-visual aspects of their Idaho life.
And, more importantly, This Country tells an important story: of who gets to be "here," who gets to be comfortable, where home is and who gets to have a home. Without preaching, without complaining, looking clearly at these Idaho locals who I think Mahdavian and his wife had a lot of affection for.
America is a land that used to be famous for telling the world that anyone could be welcome here. One end of the political spectrum has given up on that, while pretending they're more patriotic than the rest of us. But there's nothing more patriotic than a nation's best image of itself - there can be nothing more patriotic than that. They are liars and charlatans, because they have turned away from what their country can be and what it has striven to be for two hundred and fifty years. Places like rural Idaho will always be insular - small places far away can't help that. But they don't have to be unwelcoming. They don't have to curdle with paranoia and xenophobia, the way rural Idaho and a thousand other pockets of America have. That was deliberate, that was caused, that is someone's fault.
Sometimes I wish I believed in Hell, so I could have an appropriate expectation for people who deliberately stirred up hate and division so they could make a little more money and get a little more power. I don't, though. Those people will just die, like all of us. If we're lucky, they will thoroughly die, and be as forgotten as possible. In the meantime, I prefer to focus on the positive - on books like This Country.
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