TCMH v.35: The Atomic City Bar
Questions, Answers, Mysteries; All Found at the Idaho's Weirdest Li'l Bar
Though a lifelong, on/off fan of professional basketball, the only NBA game I ever caught in person was an Indiana Pacers home game in around 2007 or 2008. I only remember that timeframe because the Pacers’ opposition that night included an extremely young Kevin Durant, who we saw signing autographs outside of a downtown Indianapolis hotel earlier on game day. No idea who won the game, or if I definitively had a good time… though I likely had a blast, including some post-game barhopping in downtown Indy.
The next day, my friend and road trip partner Brandyn and I drove back to St. Louis, taking the longer way back via secondary roads. The usual Midwestern scene of roadside “antique” stores and corn fields passed by our open windows, with nothing looking all that special until we found ourselves staring at the wiiiiiiiide open gate of a small-town raceway. No one was in sight, no one was onhand to okay a walk around the facility, no one was around to stop us from taking Brandyn’s whip out for a lap or two on the banked dirt track.
Did I want to drive around the track? I very much did. Was I overruled on this? I very much was. And for the better part of two decades, I’ve been hanging onto that scene as one of life’s little “the one that got away” moments.
Life, if you hang around long enough, does have a way of repeating opportunities.
This Sunday past, I drove around the oval of a small-town dirt track. It’s called the Atomic Motor Raceway, located in the heart of Atomic City, Idaho, population 41.
According to Wikipedia: “Atomic City was called ‘Midway’ until 1950, as it is halfway between the towns of Blackfoot and Arco (home of Experimental Breeder Reactor I, the world's first electricity-generating nuclear power plant). Atomic City had a larger population when the neighboring Idaho National Laboratory site was newer, known as the ‘National Reactor Testing Station’ until 1975.”
The opportunity to visit the former Midway only came about because we saw a clearly dead bar called Magee’s, looking all ruins-ey on the side of an Idaho highway at what was a very literal crossroads. Earlier in the day, we’d gone into the nearby EBR-1 site, a retired nuclear plant and the first such facility in the U.S. to provide nuclear energy in America. Seeing the sign for Atomic City, located only a mile away, was way too tempting and was totally in line with the day’s meandering pace. And so we wandered through the shambles of Magee’s, listening to the calls of noisy crows, then pointed the car in a sideways direction. Destination: Atomic City.
To be frank, it’s not that much of a city these days. It’s not really much of a town or a village or a hamlet, either. There’re a few single-story apartments, a couple handfuls of houses, a bunch of open-to-the-elements shells, some abandoned animal enclosures, that racetrack (complete with two horses wandering the grounds) and right there in the middle of it all, a bar. The Atomic City Bar.
Walking in, I noticed something in the front window that’d normally have me walking right back out, a big ol’ Trump 2024 flag. Noticed a Trump bumper sticker on the front window, too, and some of the wall hangings didn’t suggest this as a nest of rural liberals. But everything else about the place hinted that we give it a sit-down. Included in the package was the bartender Vicki, who, with her husband, owned both the bar and the track across the road, which runs a summer series of about 10 weekend events. Would imagine that these two are providing most of the tax dollars in the township.
Vicki was chatting with a friend, who we’ll call Mary for the sake of this newsletter. The two were shooting the breeze about this ’n’ that, and it wasn’t until we were about done with our round of Twisted Teas that we started engaging directly with them. A lot of it was basic bar chatter, and complaints about big city drivers and the Idaho liquor commission seemed to get the longest airing. We talked a little bit about our jobs as Big City Journalists, which went over okay, though I had my doubts. At one point, a neighbor named Chet rolled into the bar in his wheelchair, before rolling out with what we assumed was his daily order of several Bud Light tallboys.
With the mood light, a light bulb flashed above my head and I realized that the bartender across from me owned a racetrack. That racetrack right across the street. The one that you could drive right into if someone was kind enough to let you. She knew where I was going with my question before I was done asking it, and permission was granted to take our rented-for-the-weekend Nissan Kicks out for a joy ride. Which is exactly what we did after splitting the last Twisted Tea.
(Sidebar. Vicki said that every man had three wishes and one of those was to drive a race car. I wouldn’t say that race car driving’s anywhere in My Top Ten Wishes, let alone the Top Three. But there was that whole situation back in southern Indiana in 2007 or 2008, so I’ll put it at, let’s say, #14 on my wishlist. And I’m not fully sure that taking a Nissan Kicks around a dirt track qualifies as racing, exactly. Anyway, back to our story.)
We drove the track and left little ol’ Atomic City in the rearview, happy to have had the experience. It only came about because of seeing a dead bar at the crossroads, drove a mile, walked into a place, tried to find some commonality in a place that wasn’t quite built for us. Admittedly, this was an isolated moment in an isolated place. My skin color and ability to talk to folks about whatever (a skill honed by bartending, actually) lead me into and out of a place with a story for now and a memory for later. Other people and other conversations might’ve resulted other results, no doubt.
Sunday was a weird day in a weird state. A weird feeling lingers.
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