Evan Gi

by Isabella Zhu

The countryside in Ketchum, Idaho, is everything Los Angeles is not. It is calm, quiet, and peaceful. It is full of rolling foothills and wide, endless sky, and utterly incomparable for someone that has lived in the city all his life. As Evan Gi tells it, all it takes is one autumn trip to upend one’s perception of the world entirely. The story of these two lands, as told to me, is one of contrast — contrast between emptiness and fullness, simplicity and complexity, and, ultimately, different kinds of beauty and the types of happiness that are important in life.

Los Angeles, the city, was founded in 1781, and has been steadily swelling with people ever since. From its humble origins as a small farming colony to its now-legendary status as the (or at least one of the) Entertainment Capital of the World, the city has a long and storied history. While creators in the nascent film industry began to move to the city well over a century ago, it truly hit its population boom between the World Wars. With nearly 4 million inhabitants by the most recent census, Los Angeles is the second most populous city in the United States, and worlds apart from the wild tranquility of the countryside. Not only is the city one of the most populous in the world, Los Angeles’ continued antisprawl efforts have made it fiercely dense — its enormous population condensed into relatively little space, making for an urban hustle and bustle unlike anything else.

In sharp contrast, Ketchum was founded in 1880, a full century after the Spanish colony that would come to be known as Los Angeles first settled in California. Rather than an agricultural town, Ketchum began life as a smelting town, before rapidly transitioning to sheep-shipping in the 1890s. Unlike Los Angeles, which, due to its geography and laws, attracted the burgeoning roots of what would become one of the largest industries in the world, Ketchum remained a small livestock herding town until the Union Pacific Railroad moved in to develop the resort city of Sun Valley to the east. The resort and the area’s natural beauty and abundant hiking and skiing opportunities attracted celebrities of all kinds, most notably Ernest Hemingway, which famously loved the valley in which both cities could be found, and the tourism industry has shaped the small town ever since.

The chaos of the city isn’t always a bad thing, of course. There is always something to do or see, and the sheer density means you’re never far from most things. Like many large cities, there’s a little bit of just about everything in Los Angeles. It is one of the most recognizable cities in the world, reknowned for its entertainment scene, be it movies, TV, or music, but more than that it is simply a place with a lot of people all living together, with businesses of all stripes clustered tightly together such that one can find almost anything within city bounds. Los Angeles even has some amount of nature in and around it. Like any city, it is dotted with parks, and its beaches are famous, as, arguably, are the deserts around it — which have served as the backdrops for many a film. There are even mountains around the city — the famous Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory are perched on the Santa Monica mountains, and there are plenty of smaller hills and peaks clad in vegetation throughout, but you don’t know just how different a city like Los Angeles is from the distant countryside until you’ve left the city behind.

A little over 700 miles by air — or 845 miles by road — away from Los Angeles’ metropolitan sprawl, nestled in the midst of central Idaho, the city of Ketchum lies nestled in the valley at the foot of Bald Mountain, and ensconced by the Smoky Mountains. Ketchum is a small city, a century younger, with about 0.09% the population of Los Angeles, but where Los Angeles is world-famous as the beating heart of the entertainment industry, Ketchum and neighboring Sun Valley are world-famous for their nature.

Life in the city is busy, and often very complicated, but the valley is simple, and, compared to the city, empty and isolated. That’s far from a bad thing, Evan explains. Rather, the solitary beauty of the landscape is a refreshing boon. “It’s good to just get away sometimes. Empty and isolated places are good for your mental health, you know?” It is, in other words, lonely, especially compared to Los Angeles’ urban density, but not lonely in a bad way. Rather, the loneliness might even be a necessity for a good quality of life.

Evan spent his fall break visiting the valley with two of his friends. “The simplistic lifestyle isn’t a bad lifestyle,” he said. “I’ve lived in LA all my life, so it was really different.” When I asked what exactly about it he liked most, he replied, “You get to do things that soothe and calm you, and just care about having fun more than looking cool... it was really perspective-altering for me.” The social environment and culture of Los Angeles, it seems, is especially highpressure in comparison to a place like Ketchum, where comfort and the beauty of the natural world valued by the tourism industry from the city. Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities in the country, but Ketchum, and the surrounding area, is nearly 90% White, something which a person of color might be abundantly and uncomfortably aware of when learning about, let alone visiting the area. “I was kind of nervous,” Evan went on to say, “but people were so hospitable... I was treated the same as everyone else. It opened my eyes to the fact that most people are inherently good.” and the area’s humble livestock-raising roots mesh together into something altogether more relaxed and, ultimately, fun. There is a little bit of everything in the city, but sometimes you just want all of it to stop, to escape away and take a break from the constant physical and social hustle and bustle.

Still, there are other things about Ketchum that are very different

At the end of our talk, he pulls out his phone and shows me some of the pictures he took in Idaho. “I took pictures of views that I thought were interesting, but they look kind of normal,” he says, clearly disappointed about being unable to entirely capture or convey the sights he saw. “A lot of pictures feels like they’re more beautiful than the original subject, but these are kind of the opposite. They’re not as good as the real thing.”