Life in North Idaho
I have a framed poster in my house that shows a northern Idaho scene with the caption, North Idaho, A State of Mind.
What a blessing to have spent twenty years of our lives in North Idaho. We owned two houses: a lakeside on Lake Coeur d’Alene with a dock and up in the mountains with a sailboat on Lake Pend Oreille.
The image is an artist’s rendering of Lake Pend Oreille in North Idaho. We moored our U.S. Yacht sailboat at the Bitter End Marina on Lake Pend Oreille, the 38th largest lake by area in the United States and fifth deepest in the nation, so deep it was home to a Navy submarine base. The illustration reminds me of the straight to Button Hook Bay, a popular place to put in overnight, by anchor or moored at one of the docks. Button Hook Bay is a part of Farragut State Park, once the second-largest naval training center in WWII and still home to a U.S. Navy submarine base.
Living in North Idaho will always be a top-of-the-list period of our lives. When we built our last house mountainside with a magnificent view of the valley and mountains across the lake, and above a world-class golf course and equestrian center. Sometimes it snowed so heavily that accumulations narrowed the long gravel driveway to the main road, and we hired a tractor to widen the way. When we returned home from work, the first thing I did was shovel a path from our bedroom deck to the hot tub, cleared the snow off the lid, scoped out the frogs, and, out of the rising steam, watched large white puffy snowflakes sea-saw back and forth.
On evening walks, we fed magnificent thoroughbred horses apples under the terrified watchful eyes of our German Shepherd Hawkeye. The seasonal stream beside the house was the pathway of a seasonal bear who, every spring, knocked down an eight-foot-high bird feeder to the ground. A large elk herd grazed just east, not too far from our bedroom slider and out the picture window. Deer were abundant and gave birth, often twins, on our front lawn, and there was the occasional moose on our hikes.
The move to sunny Arizona was a sad acceptance of endings and beginnings. Of all the places we lived, North Idaho will always be home. Seventeen hundred miles from where I was born, Des Moines, Iowa, where I learned as much about life and myself to grant me courage to leave the place I thought was the center of the universe, where I traded streetlights for starlight, the barking dog for the crooning coyote, and the ever-present hum of traffic for end-of-the-world silence. The suburban code of lush, well-manicured lawns, one after another, was replaced by the random brilliance of waist-high Goldenrod, Oxeye Daisies, and Mountain Phlox in the valley below.
