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PEOPLE compiled by

Susan Drinkard

watching

“What is the best concert you’ve seen at the Panida Theater?”

“The Fat Tones. They were bold and original.”

Robin Lantrip Retired Hope

READER 111 Cedar Street, Suite 9 Sandpoint, ID 83864 (208)265-9724

www.sandpointreader.com Publisher: Ben Olson ben@sandpointreader.com Editorial: Zach Hagadone (Editor) zach@sandpointreader.com Lyndsie Kiebert (News Editor) lyndsie@sandpointreader.com Cameron Rasmusson (emeritus) John Reuter (emeritus) Advertising: Jodi Berge Jodi@sandpointreader.com Contributing Artists: Daryl Baird (cover), Ben Olson, Bill Borders, Susan Drinkard, POAC

“The Banff Film Festival last year.”

Zane Brown Aircraft mechanic Athol

Contributing Writers: Zach Hagadone, Ben Olson, Lyndsie Kiebert, Steve Klatt, Emily Erickson, Cynthia Dalsing, Tim Henney, Ashley Kesten, Brenden Bobby, Chris Corpus, Hannah Combs, Chris Park.

Submit stories to: stories@sandpointreader.com Printed weekly at: Tribune Publishing Co. Lewiston, ID Subscription Price: $115 per year

“The Follies. I found out I was pregnant right afterward; that was my last hurrah.”

Lindsey Klein Nurse Sandpoint

“I liked the animated short films. And my graduation from Forrest Bird Charter School was held there.”

Rocco Sherman Student at North Idaho College Ponderay “My husband and I are both bow hunters. We went to the Panida to see a film series on archery. It was good. The theater was packed and a lot of kids were there; it was good to see their interest.”

Michelle Eshelman Receptionist at Williams, Schiller and Styer CPAs and Consultants Sandpoint

Web Content: Keokee The Sandpoint Reader is a weekly publication owned and operated by Ben Olson and Keokee. It is devoted to the arts, entertainment, politics and lifestyle in and around Sandpoint, Idaho.

We hope to provide a quality alternative by offering honest, in-depth reporting that reflects the intelligence and interests of our diverse and growing community.

The Reader is printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink. Leftover copies are collected and recycled weekly, or burned in massive bonfires to appease the gods of journalism.

Free to all, limit two copies per person.

Sandpoint Reader letter policy: The Sandpoint Reader welcomes letters to the editor on all topics.

Requirements: –No more than 300 words –Letters may not contain excessive profanity or libelous material. Please elevate the discussion.

Letters will be edited to comply with the above requirements. Opinions expressed in these pages are those of the writers, not necessarily the publishers.

Email letters to: letters@sandpointreader.com Check us out on the web at: www.sandpointreader.com Like us on Facebook.

About the Cover

This week’s cover was created by local artist Daryl Baird. The piece, titled “Barn Owl,” was done in gouche and watercolor pencil on acrylic paper from a photograph by Tanja Brandt. Thanks Daryl!

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NEWS

Budgets on local, state level shift to meet COVID-19 challenges

By Zach Hagadone and Lyndsie Kiebert Reader Staff Nearly four months after the state of Idaho began responding in earnest to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Sandpoint City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton provided some additional detail on how the virus and the response to it have affected the state and local economies.

Speaking to the Sandpoint City Council on July 1, Stapleton noted that the state’s fiscal year closed June 30 with a balanced budget — as is mandated by the Idaho Constitution. Gem State budget writers are projecting a revenue surplus of between $100 million and $150 million over what was anticipated; however, Stapleton said that the city should expect declines in revenue sharing amounts going into the next fiscal year beyond what was anticipated in the previous budget writing cycle.

Consistent with long-term sales tax trending, local revenue from receipts exceeded the budget by $3.2 million by the close of FY 2020. Also encouraging to city budget managers, as of June 30, the 1% voter-approved local option tax was trending “at or above budget,” Stapleton said.

Yet, while LOT revenue remains robust — necessary for funding the ongoing resurfacing and upgrade work at War Memorial Field — the resort city tax has taken a big hit as visitors stay away from town on coronavirus concerns.

The RCT, a 7% tax on hotel-motel occupancy and other temporary lodging of 30 days or less, is down 21%, amounting to a decline of about $40,000 into municipal coffers. According to Stapleton, that’s thereabouts of 60% of what the city collects from June through September.

“We’ll continue to have to watch that very closely,” she said.

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Resort city tax revenue goes to support public safety services, including police, fire and community resource officers.

To support those vital service sectors, the city is drawing on a set-aside pot of funding totaling nearly $300,000 from the CARES Act COVID-19 response bill passed through Congress in the spring. Stapleton said Sandpoint has incurred about $30,000 in expenses as of July 1 related to public safety — primarily to fund the purchase of personal protective equipment and sanitation supplies for first responders, as well as signage meant to inform citizens of public health guidance on public properties.

What’s more, city staff is recommending to the council that a second round of funding be allocated through the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation — a first round of financial support having already been mostly disbursed.

As the spring and summer have been dominated by COVID-19 closures and restrictions, and with the virus and its attendant responses uncertain in the coming seasons, Stapleton said the big question is “how we’re going to weather this COVID-19 pandemic as we go into the fall and winter months.”

“We will be recommending an additional $40,000 to the program to support businesses and their needs in the fall and winter months,” she said.

Moving forward, city staff is recommending additional monies for public safety, including hazard pay for first responders, if needed, as well as funding for overtime, sanitization, cleaning and supply needs. While Stapleton admitted it’s hard to plan accurately as cases continue to spike both in the Panhandle Health District and state as a whole, the city should budget for a further $61,600 in public safety dollars.

The city has also already applied to participate in the state’s property tax relief program for the next fiscal year.

“That will provide much needed property tax relief for our citizens,” Stapleton said.

Among the big-ticket budget items likely to come before the council is a line item calling for $188,000 to pay for online technology improvements, in case City Hall needs to make accommodations for public involvement and participation in meetings, as well as the ability for city government to function remotely.

Because the city building was never designed with pandemic conditions in mind, Stapleton nodded to the frequent overflow crowds at recent City Council meetings as reason to invest in improvements including monitors in the lobby outside the council chambers.

Still, “we are hearing from community members that many of them do not want to participate electronically,” Stapleton said.

The city transitioned away from its prior streaming platform to a Zoom-enabled process, which is accessible — including archived meetings — on the city of Sandpoint YouTube channel, accessible here: sandpointidaho. gov/your-government/meeting-agendas.

Bonner County commission-

ers have also moved to allocate more funding to technology improvements. At its regular Tuesday meeting, the board voted unanimously to pull $48,000 from the 2019 General Fund Statutory Reserve Budget to pay for “the addition of a new county employee” and “the need to install new technology for meeting streaming stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Commissioner Dan McDonald said the new employee is an information systems manager — responsible for working with the county’s Enterprise Resource Planning system, which allows departments to better collaborate with shared information.

McDonald described the job as a “hybrid IT position that also has the ability to work between numerous departments to find communication and efficiency solutions.”

In the capitol, Idaho Gov. Brad Little announced that state agencies would need to cut their budgets by 5% in fiscal year 2021, resulting in a $200 million decrease across the board. Boise State Public Radio reports that total state revenues could drop between $349 million and $585 million, according to Paul Headlee, director of the Legislature’s budget division.

Meanwhile, the public safety realities of the pandemic continue to grow more severe. Idaho

A graph showing confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases in Idaho. Courtesy Idaho Dept. of Health and Welfare. logged 430 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 on July 8, bringing the statewide total to 8,969. The state also reported four new virus-related deaths, bringing that total to 98.

Bonner County had 44 cases as of July 8 according to the Panhandle Health District, 26 of which were active.

In a “position statement” released July 8, PHD officials wrote that in response to the rising COVID-19 numbers in North Idaho, the health district “strongly endorses community-wide masking, social (physical) distancing, and repeated proper hand hygiene (properly wash hands, use hand sanitizer, keep hands away from face).”

Little will hold a press conference July 9 at noon (Mountain Time) to address whether Idaho will be able to leave Stage 4 of the Idaho Rebounds economic reopening plan and transition to a more local approach to pandemic restrictions determined by cities and health districts.

The governor will also share the Idaho State Board of Education’s plans for possibly reopening the state’s K-12 schools in the fall at the Thursday press conference.

Access a live stream of the event at idahoptv.org.

NEWS

Survey results: Most want dogs Road and bridge at City Beach, with restrictions reflections: Summer 2020

By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff

Prompted in part by the ongoing debate over how best to manage the goose population at City Beach, the city of Sandpoint floated a survey in June asking area residents how they feel about allowing dogs in public parks, trails and open spaces.

The people answered in huge numbers.

By the time the survey closed June 30 on the city’s public engagement platform, opentownhall.com, 811 visitors had left 655 responses, amounting to 32.8 hours of public comment at three minutes per response.

Far and away, the most heavily trafficked survey presented by the city, which this year earned an award from the Idaho Association of Cities for its public engagement efforts.

The results, which city spokesperson Mary Malone said are still being combed through

by City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton, came down decidedly in favor of allowing dogs at City Beach — 18.1% of respondents gave an unqualified “yes” to the idea, while 56% of survey takers said “yes — with restrictions.”

A total of 25.9% of respondents were opposed to the allowing dogs at the beach.

Proposed restrictions on dogs at the beach included allowing them on-leash on pathways only

By Steve Klatt Reader Contributor

(28.2% in favor); dogs on-leash but prohibited from being on the sandy portions of the beach (45.5% in favor); dogs onleash during certain hours only (23.1%); dogs off-leash during certain hours (36.5%); dogs on-leash during a given period of time, for example between September and April; and dogs off-leash during from September to April (53.2%).

Asked to rate Sandpoint’s ordinance on dogs in public spaces on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “too generous” and 5 being “too restrictive”), 29.1% gave it a “4” while 31.1% ranked it “5.”

The city amended its dog ordinance in 2011, allowing dogs on-leash at Lakeview and Hickory parks, as well as in 2013 when it allowed dogs on the Humbird Mill Park/Pend d’Oreille Bay Trail with leashes recommended.

According to the city’s survey, the council, mayor and staff “have heard many requests for changes to the city’s current policy,” aimed at three outcomes:

deterring geese and lessening their impact on City Beach, creating more fenced-in dog parks in the city limits and allowing dogs at parks during off-season times to give residents — and their pets — the opportunity to get exercise during the winter months.

A large number of survey respondents — 66.8% — said they would favor fenced dog park(s) and 57.8% said they would make use of a dedicated dog park(s) within city limits. Almost 80% of survey participants said they would use dog-friendly spaces that are open seasonally, that is, from September to April.

It is unclear when the dog ordinance may be revisited by the City Council, though Councilman Andy Groat has signaled his interest in looking again at City Code to allow for more flexibility in granting dogs and their owners freer access to public spaces.

See the full results of the survey at bit.ly/3gCMTk2.

State Board of Ed. preps to release fall reopening guidance

By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff Parents and guardians of school-age kids in the Lake Pend Oreille School District can expect some new guidance on what the 2020-’21 academic year will look like, when the Idaho State Board of Education convenes at a special meeting Thursday, July 9 at 7:30 a.m.

(Pacific Time) in Boise.

According to the agenda,

posted at boardofed.idaho.gov, Idaho Gov. Brad Little will address the board regarding fall reopening, followed by a board discussion. The meeting can be viewed via live streaming at facebook.com/idsboe. Call in for audio only at 1-877-8207829, public participant code: 8461895.

LPOSD Superintendent Tom Albertson told the Reader on July 8, “I don’t have any other information at this time. A few

districts throughout the state are releasing drafts ahead of the SBE plan.”

Idaho Ed News reports that reopening policies will vary district by district, in keeping with Little’s strategy of devolving coronavirus protocols to local municipalities, including cities, public health districts and — in the case of education — school administrators and boards of trustees.

The past three months have been a most interesting time in the life of the Bonner County Road Department. Mid-March found us shuffling half crews on and off for the next six weeks, during which our summer construction schedule began to slip immediately. By the time we got our full crews working together again, Mother Nature decided to play pranks upon us with frequent and persistent rain events. As of the end of June, we were finishing our magnesium chloride treatments from the first of the month.

The interruptions and rain delays have also upended our construction schedules for the year.

We have been able to get a substantial amount of work done on North Kootenai Road, brushing work done up on Eastshore Road at Priest Lake, and several smaller roads graveled near Cocolalla Lake that have been waiting a few years. A project impacted by this year’s interruptions has been our bituminous surface treatment (or chipseal) project for Lakeshore Drive, being split into road improvements later this year and surface treatment being completed next summer.

Chip sealing projects went underway right after the Fourth of July in the Sagle area, moving out to the Clark Fork area and then up to Priest Lake. Depending on what little tricks Mother Nature is hiding up her sleeves, we should be done with chips around the middle of August.

We will have a crew working on brushing and ditches up Baldy Mountain Road, plus a contractor clearing right-of-way on Woodland Drive.

We are working on setting up a guardrail project for an area

on Denton Road and the striping of roads will get under contract before too much longer.

Bonner County got a unique opportunity to participate in planning efforts funded by the Federal Highway Administration to create a Local Roads Safety Plan. The numbers of serious and fatal crashes on local roads is disconcerting at best, and I have wanted to study our crash data to determine if similarities in crashes exist that might be treated systemically for improved driver safety.

This effort has been made a bit cumbersome by COVID 19 restrictions on travel this year, but getting traffic safety planners to help us analyze our road system is a good starting point. We have been awarded a grant for right-of-way clearing of hazard trees in a couple of years and that will help reduce the severity of future crashes.

We are working on a project to replace a small bridge that is failing out on the Gypsy Bay Road after summer traffic slows down and have a bridge deck restoration job scheduled up on Peninsula Road once we begin to have some warm days. There are three more intersection lights we will have installed on Highway 95 south of Sandpoint later this summer and will continue to expand our lighted intersection program each year.

It’s hard to believe, but we are beginning to gather up our stockpiles of anti-skid material for winter already in a program that costs nearly $2 million each season. It has been good to add three new trucks to our aging fleet.

Let’s all drive safely and have patience with our crews working to improve your county roads.

Steve Klatt is the director of the Bonner County Road and Bridge Department.

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NEWS

Anti-smelter groups will take land sale to WA Supreme Court

By Lyndsie Kiebert Reader Staff

Citizen groups opposed to the Newport, Wash., silicon smelter have announced they will appeal to the Washington Supreme Court in a case against the Pend Oreille County Public Utility District regarding the agency’s land sale to the company behind the smelter.

Responsible Growth*NE Washington and Citizens Against the Newport Silicon Smelter filed the lawsuit against the PUD, Pend Oreille County and HiTest Sand, Inc. — the parent company of smelter creator PacWest — alleging that PUD officials violated the law by selling the land on which the smelter is planned to be built. The case has seen Spokane Superior Court and the Division 3 Court of Appeals in Washington state, and both courts upheld the land sale.

RG*NEW representative Tracy Morgan confirmed July 2 that the court of appeals opinion had officially been published, and that the anti-smelter groups plan to file a petition for review with the Washington Supreme Court.

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“We still stand strong with the Kalispel Tribe, Sierra Club and dozens of other entities in keeping this dirty industry from polluting our air and water and imperilling citizens’ health and future,” Morgan wrote in an email to the Sandpoint Reader.

When the Washington state court of appeals issued its unpublished opinion in favor of the PUD in April, Spokane-based attorney Rick Eichstaedt — who represents the anti-smelter groups — told the Reader he believed the decision set “a dangerous precedent.”

“We disagree with the opinion in large part because, essentially, what the court of appeals said is that a public utility district can — after the fact, after a property has been purchased or sold — come up with an excuse for why those actions occurred,” he said.

RG*NEW and CANSS have until Aug. 2 to file a petition for review with the Washington Supreme Court.

Apart from the lawsuit, PacWest has announced that the smelter project is “on hold” as the company waits for Pend Oreille County to rezone its land for industrial use.

PERSPECTIVES

Emily Articulated

A column by and about Millennials

Lessons of the Sorting Hat

By Emily Erickson Reader Columnist

When things get hard to process in the real world, I often escape to fantasy worlds for respite, coming out on the other side of a magical book, podcast or movie with a renewed sense of clarity or lightness to my experience.

As the complexities of our world are often too difficult to sort through in real-time, fantasy, as a genre, takes us to a new world with a different backdrop, allowing us to explore the same social structures, moral complexes and internal struggles we face every day, but from the safe distance of metaphor and whimsy, instead of reality.

There hasn’t been a world to which I’ve escaped more for exploring such things than the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Steeped in metaphors about good, evil, and the murky middle ground between the two; with heroes full of darkness and villains with shreds of redemption and light; and a perpetual exploration of the power of fear, division, community and love — the Harry Potter series has lessons in every character, on nearly every page.

One character and his role within the wizarding world worth contemplating is the Sorting Hat. The Sorting Hat is a bewitched, free-thinking hat that has the unique responsibility of sifting through the minds of young witches and wizards at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In its role, the hat learns about each

Emily Erickson. new student entering the school by sitting on their head, and places them into one of the four Hogwarts houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff.

Each of the four houses are characterized by guiding principles, with Gryffindors being courageous and daring, Slytherins as ambitious and resourceful, Ravelclaws with cleverness and intellect, and Hufflepuffs as champions of fairness and loyalty.

When sorted into a house, that house and all of the other witches and wizards within it, becomes a student’s family, with living quarters, classes, meal times and extra-curriculars being segregated from, or sparingly shared with, students of other houses.

The Sorting Hat is commonly thought to sort students based on their dominant character traits, placing like-minded children into houses based on where they’d find the most camaraderie in their personality type.

The benefit of this homogenous-style of sorting would be to help students adjust to their life away from home and find

fast friends, feeling comfortable in sharing their experiences with people who think and act similarly to themselves.

But, if putting like-minded kids together was the Sorting Hat’s only criteria for sorting, there’d be danger in this method as well. If students were assigned to houses in an attempt to exclusively surround them with other kids just like them — the opportunity to be challenged, to expand their thinking, and to practice tolerance — would be lost. As the Harry Potter series is a never-ending lesson about the danger of division, and the corrosiveness of being stuck in a single perspective, this version of the Sorting Hat has never quite made sense.

There’s another way to think about the Sorting Hat, and the criteria it might be using to sort students. First introduced to me on the Imaginary Worlds podcast, by Eric Molinsky, the other school of thought on the Sorting Hat is that it looks at a student’s mind, not only seeing their existing character traits, but also, the potential they have for personal growth.

With this method, the Sorting Hat would place students into the house that would most enable them to foster the aspects of their character necessary for reaching their highest potential.

Instead of simply separating kids into groups with others most similar to them, the Sorting Hat would recognize the benefit of putting students into a house alongside kids that could make them better (i.e., Hermione Granger, a clear Ravenclaw, and Neville Longbottom, a total Hufflepuff, both being placed

in Gryffindor, and becoming a better witch and wizard because of it).

By surrounding students with other young people possessing complementary strengths and weaknesses, different ways of viewing the world, and aspects of character from which they could all learn and grow, the Sorting Hat was creating an environment in which everyone was able to become higher-func-

tioning, more balanced versions of themselves.

That idea — that personal growth and a well rounded perspective cannot be fully reached with a homogenous sorting of beliefs, character traits, and ideas — might just be an idea that transcends fiction, and can find its home in our current reality.

Mischief Managed.

Retroactive

By BO

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COMMUNITY

Sandpoint SummerFest cancels 2020 season

A photo from a recent SummerFest.

Courtesy Eureka Institute.

By Ben Olson Reader Staff Organizers for the annual music concert Sandpoint SummerFest confirmed July 8 that the event has been canceled for 2020 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“It comes with an extremely heavy heart that unfortunately, we have decided it isn’t socially responsible for us to hold any events in 2020,” wrote Steve Holt, executive director of Eureka Institute, which hosts the event.

“The Eureka Institute is about education and leadership,” Holt wrote in a statement first released in May. “Bringing people from all over the Northwest to the Eureka Center, potentially putting people’s lives at risk, is a situation we aren’t able to reconcile with our mission. We are

sincerely sorry.”

This year would have been the 26th annual event, which was formerly known as JerryFest.

Robb Talbott with Mattox Farm Productions, who also helps with booking SummerFest acts, told the Reader that organizers are already working on next year’s event.

“We are moving forward with plans for next year and are looking forward to continuing this great Sandpoint tradition,” Talbott said.

“I want to convey again how difficult and painful this decision was,” Holt wrote. “However, in the end, I think it was the right decision for the right reasons.”

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OPINION

‘When you protect everybody you protect yourself’ A nurse practitioner’s perspective on COVID-19

By Cynthia Dalsing Reader Contributor

I wanted to write this article when I heard that more than 400 health care workers have died from COVID-19. This struck me — these were my colleagues, the professionals who care for sick people the moment they hit the hospital door.

They did not choose to risk their lives at their job. They just did their job.

These were physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, medical workers and custodial staff; so many layers of people who take care of us, who most of us are unaware of.

While the number is more than 400 in the U.S., worldwide it is much greater. This is really sad. We need these professionals now more than ever.

As a nurse practitioner serving in this community for more than 20 years, I am alarmed at the division COVID-19 has caused. Before I retired, I did not ask my patients’ preferences before providing care. I did not base my care on religious or political affiliation, whether they smoked, wore a seat belt, or a helmet when biking; if they voted or not. As professionals we just provide the care that’s needed.

The COVID-19 situation reminds me of Dr. Seuss’s book, The Sneetches.

In it, a character comes to town with a new machine that puts a star on some sneetches’ bellies — but not all sneetches — so they can tell each other apart.

It’s important to realize that all these sneetches looked the same until they got a star.

When they first got their stars they felt pretty special — above the other sneetches. With their new adornment, the sneetches also made assumptions about other sneetches. None of these situations played out well. Everyone wanted a star, of course, and there was also a machine to take the stars off their bellies, if they so desired.

Everything turned into chaos when they couldn’t tell each other apart; some without stars, some with several. Suddenly they realized they are more alike than different.

Our community has been mostly unscathed by this virus, but the num-

bers are rising. We don’t know exactly what will happen because this is a new virus. Because we can have COVID-19 without any symptoms, it is a perfect storm for transmission.

Now the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are more important than ever, because they are based on what we know to be effective.

The three “W’s” are the easiest guide: 1. wear a mask; 2. wash your hands; 3. watch your distance.

If 95% of people would wear face masks, we could save more than 30,000 lives. An unprotected cough will travel about eight feet. A two-layer stitched mask reduces this distance traveled to 2.5 inches. If 80% of people wear face masks, spread will reduce as if we were in strict lockdown. This is big.

Let’s remember all the people in our community who must work to keep our town running and their families cared for — the people in the grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, police, bank employees. This list is long and incomplete. If we protect them we also protect vulnerable people who can’t stay home all the time but must go out for groceries, prescriptions or to see their nurse practitioners.

When you protect everybody you protect yourself.

Because the nurse practitioner community cares about all of us, we will be distributing masks and hand sanitizer to businesses. We all need to take care of each other. We don’t need to label some people with or without stars.

Here’s what you can do: wear a

mask, wash your hands or use sanitizer, and stay six feet away from other people. It makes me feel safer.

Until we can test everyone to determine who is really carrying the virus and until we have a vaccination we can keep our community safe and open. Anger triggers anger and judgment, it’s not helpful. There are really only two groups

of people, those who have had COVID-19 and those who will get it. We can do this for our community. Read the book!

Cynthia Dalsing, MSN/ARNP, serves as District 1 representative of the Nurse Practitioners of Idaho.

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‘Team Sandpoint’ can beat COVID-19 spread...

Bouquets: • A Bouquet goes out to the Pend Oreille Arts Council this week. POAC has been expanding our artistic minds in this community for decades, and I am so appreciative of their annual events, including Friday’s ArtWalk and their Performance Series. They are such a worthy organization for a donation if you’re looking for a local nonprofit to support.

• I’ve ordered more food to go from local restaurants the past few months than any other time in my life thanks to coronavirus. I’d like to commend all of our local restaurants that offer compostable or green packaging for their to go customers. I get it: styrofoam and plastic are cheaper options, but the amount of waste generated by these landfill-clogging materials is astounding.

Barbs: • The recent effort by several local activists to label the Love Lives Here campaign as a “hate group” is yet another example of gaslighting and hypocrisy in this community. Bonner County Commissioner Dan McDonald joined in the dogpiling by posting a picture of a Love Lives Here sticker on Facebook and proclaiming that it is a hate group. This guy, I swear. Can someone help him find a hobby so he doesn’t spend five hours a day on Facebook, waging silly word battles like a pre-teen and singling out private businesses and individuals who don’t follow his narrowly defined ideology? For the record, if you judge Love Lives Here based on a few comments by a member of the group, I’ve got a folder overflowing with hateful, inappropriate, threatening comments from many of these pearl-clutching keyboard warriors who incessantly claim the high ground when they aren’t bullying and slinging mud. #hypocrisy.

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Dear editor, My book club planned to meet outside last week for the first time this year, six- to 10-foot distancing, masks optional. One of us had been in another small meeting, and learned that the son of the hostess tested positive for COVID-19. She is at low risk: they were outside in the sunshine and social distancing.

Still, she decided not to come to our meeting, not wanting to risk our health. Then we all canceled. It was a good reminder.

This was hard to do.

If you self-quarantine you may be asymptomatic, but still spreading.

Even if you test negative, you may pick it up again. If you test positive for antibodies, you may or may not be able to get it again, but you can still spread the virus. Without enough testing and infection tracing, we can only guess blindly where the virus is.

We held strong March through May, and took precautions. Now there is spread by community members and visitors. We are losing.

No one can predict what’s coming.

Every time one of us takes a chance, we take a chance for everybody.

Just like a football player who takes a chance that the referee won’t see a foul, everyone on the team suffers the penalty. Imagine if half the team took that chance at the same time.

We know how to win, even if we are playing in the dark. If most of us take precautions most of the time, we can keep beating the virus.

Go team Sandpoint!

Nancy Gerth Sagle

Sick of McDonald’s bullying...

Dear editor, If you thought that what Bonner County Commissioner Dan McDonald did was illegal when he called in his heavily armed friends to downtown Sandpoint to keep an eye on the protesting kids, well, turns out you might be right. That’s what legal experts who study paramilitary activity around the country think.

These experts, who helped the city of Charlottesville, Va., after the domestic terrorist attack in 2017, have offered to help the city of Sandpoint with some free legal advice. Finally, a chance to stand up to McDonald and his heavily armed friends, who seem to care more about their right to carry guns than just about anything or anyone else.

But will they stand up for peace-loving citizens? Maybe not. I mean their own police chief praised the militants. So who do you trust?

The police force or the militants?

Both? Neither? Many of us are confused.

I for one am sick of McDonald’s bullying. And his spreading of lies about looters coming to town. And risking the public health of our community. I could go on and on.

I want to thank Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad for having the guts to speak out against paramilitary groups gathering in our downtown. He does it a lot more diplomatically than I ever could.

Now, who has the guts to stand with him?

Mike Murray Sagle

Don’t give too much credit to ‘Founding Fathers’...

Dear editor, Just a comment on the last two paragraphs of Sandy Compton’s article in the July 2 issue of the Reader. I think he is giving more credit to the Founding Fathers than they deserve.

To imply that maybe they didn’t mean just “men” when they wrote “all men are created equal” is to turn a blind eye. They either didn’t believe women deserved equal standing with men, or the thought never even occurred to them that women should have equal rights. I am not sure which is worse.

It took until 1920 for women to get the right to vote nationally, and it was an uphill battle all the way.

That is over 140 years. They also definitely didn’t think blacks should vote, being as how they were slaves and all.

That is a struggle still going on today.

Jon Nylund Sagle

Idaho judicial system lenient on sexual offenders...

Dear editor, I was shocked, disgusted and angry after reading about the jail sentence received by Richard Fowler in Bonner County. After sexually abusing two young girls for approximately four years, he was given concurrent prison sentences.

However, these were suspended prison sentences, so he will only be serving six months in the Bonner County jail, due to his age and

health problems.

His issues should be less important considerations in the punishment he received for his immoral/ illegal behaviors than the impact he has had and will continue to have on the lives of his two victims.

These young women survived years of sexual abuse, participated in a criminal investigation, which involved remembering/reliving the abuse, provided impact statements about the consequences of the abuse on their lives and did their best to assure this man would never be free to sexually abuse other young women.

Our local judicial system provided this criminal with nothing more than a “slap on the wrist” for his horrific crimes. He should have been directed to serve his sentenced years in prison. Instead, in six months he will be back in the community where he can continue to repeat his repugnant behaviors What kind of a message does this send to other victims of sexual abuse? Something like, “Don’t bother to report sexual abuse because you’ll have to go through emotional trauma and then nothing much will happen to your abuser?” No wonder most victims of sexual assault and rape don’t report their experiences.

Meanwhile, in Ada County, a former Idaho budget director received a mere 90 day jail sentence for having more than 6,000 images of child pornography on his computer. I hope you also feel shocked, disgusted and angry about these judicial sentences.

Kam Majer Sandpoint

Please help the Panida...

Dear editor, The Panida Theater is unique and special. It brings our community together and has for nearly 93 years now. Anyone who has been here for a while has their Panida story to tell. There’s no other place like it in the county and losing it would leave a hole in our downtown, our lives and our hearts.

Please help.

Susan Bates-Harbuck Panida Mom and friend Sandpoint

Send letters to the editor to: letters@sandpointreader.com.

Please keep under 300 words and avoid libelous statements and excessive profanity.

BY THE NUMBERS

By Ben Olson Reader Staff

84%

The proportion of small business employees who have been supported by the Paycheck Protection Program during the economic downturn of the coronavirus pandemic.

51 out of 51

Idaho’s ranking in the nation in per-pupil spending at public schools, according to the 2020 “Rankings of the States” report by the National Education Association. Idaho took last place among all 50 states and the District of Columbia in 2019, also. The national average was $12,978 per pupil during the 2018-2019 school year, while Idaho’s average was $6,747.

>3 million

The number of confirmed and probable coronavirus cases reported in the United States as of July 8. There was one case on Jan. 21. Within 99 days, 1 million Americans became infected.

Just 43 days after that, there was 2 million cases in the U.S. and, 28 days later, the U.S. reached 3 million cases.

8,969

The number of confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus reported in Idaho as of July 8.

There were 3,189 cases as of one month ago (June 8).

50%

The estimated proportion of American workers who are now working remotely, according to a recent study by MIT economists. They concluded that 35.2% of workers switched to working remotely in response to the pandemic while 15% reported they were already working from home.

PERSPECTIVES

Dad was dead wrong

Recollections of a father who was as loved as he was mistaken about others

By Tim Henney Reader Contributor

My dad, a late-1920s campus celebrity at USC and an up-and-coming L.A. business leader until he became an alcoholic and died at age 46, didn’t much care for Blacks, Latinos, Asians or anyone else who didn’t look like him. He didn’t like Catholics or Jews, either.

Born on a Kansas dirt farm in 1902, he became student body president at L.A.’s Lincoln High, led the student ROTC program and won a scholarship to USC. As far as I know, he never visited New York or Chicago or Europe or Hawaii or went anywhere on a plane.

He never served in the military.

He was, in retrospect, the sort of person Mark Twain had in mind when he said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

When I was a little kid, my dad’s avocation was announcing half-time activities over the public address system at USC football games in the L.A. Coliseum. I was usually with him.

I cheered for Jackie Robinson, a young Black athlete from UCLA, when he played against USC in 1939.

My dad didn’t like UCLA or Jackie Robinson. He said Jackie led a gang, carried a razor and cut up white boys like me.

When my dad taught me to lift both toilet lids before peeing, he said Jews lifted only the top lid. When we watched Notre Dame’s football team play SC, he said Notre Dame players were Catholics and played dirty.

When a Chinese parking attendant pushed himself casually off the front fender of our car pulling into a downtown L.A. Chinatown cafe, my dad

shouted a racial slur at him. A dustup was averted when my dad, never involved in law enforcement, flashed a big, bright honorary deputy sheriff badge — always front-and-center in his wallet. (Many SC alumni his age carried such badges for helping elect classmate Eugene Biscailuz L.A. County sheriff in 1932).

Unlike my dad’s brief and provincial professional life, mine has been long and much traveled; my 1957 bride and I are in our 14th home and, unlike my dad, I spent too much of my early career aboard commercial and corporate jets.

It took a lot of growing up, a lot of friendships of every color and belief for me to realize, long after his sudden death, that my dad was wrong on every count. I loved him deeply despite his crude views, which as a boy I didn’t evaluate. He was

my best pal. Yet today I could not disagree more with his unlearned, backwater bigotry.

When I see TV scenes of Trumpites roaring and applauding the president’s blatant lies, I think, “These decent but gullible people are the most powerful reason there is for prioritizing higher education in America.”

When armed citizens patrol Sandpoint streets, I see costumed John Wayne wannabes (a celluloid hero, he repeatedly dodged the draft during World War II) strutting around allegedly protecting people but actually compensating for serious personal inadequacies and failures.

The same, except doubled, for whoever sent them into town to cause chaos.

My dad was dead wrong in his warped views of fellow humans who differed from him.

WEIRD NEWS

By Ben Olson Reader Staff

‘Exploding Whale Memorial Park’ honors whale that went out with a bang

As far as origins stories go, an exploding whale takes the cake.

The “Exploding Whale Memorial Park” opened recently in Florence, Ore., taking its name for the incendiary event that occurred on Nov. 12, 1970, when local officials crammed dynamite into a beached and decomposing sperm whale that measured 45 feet long and weighed about eight tons.

Local news stations filmed the historic proceedings, which had the unfortunate aftermath of showering everything — and everybody — in the vicinity with bits of dead whale.

The park held a naming contest, with “Exploding Whale Memorial Park” winning in a landslide.

In what may be hailed as one of the first viral videos, city officials blew up the dead whale because it posed a serious health hazard. It was too big to drag away or bury, so city officials planned to blow it up, under a broken system that leaving bite-size chunks for devalues and disproportionately scavenging birds and crabs targets black lives. A Black per- to clean up. son has no choice in the skin he It didn’t exactly go to plan. or she wears. To compare skin to After the half-ton of exclothes is a blatant disregard for plosives were set off, a local reporter said, “The blast human life. We can see where Sandpoint High School students blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.” learn this behavior.

The humor of the situaWhat was once a joyful holition quickly gave way to a day in our town, is now a platform run for survival, the reporter for those who wish to spread a said, as people ran screamwhite supremacist agenda. ing from the huge chunks of The members of Sandpoint whale carcass raining from who stand with Black lives will the sky. not back down in the face of your After the explosion, much intimidation. We have had enough of the cetacean’s body was too big for scavengers to of the race-baiting and bullying. carry away, so the demolition We will continue to exercise our crew ended up buying pieces First Amendment rights because of the body on the beach.

Agendas on display at Sandpoint Fourth of July parade

By Ashley Kesten Reader Contributor

I am one of the 30 or so young adults who started the peaceful demonstrations in Sandpoint, in support of the national Black Lives Matter movement. I was very disappointed to see divisive and racially insensitive messages allowed to be displayed in the Sandpoint Independence Day parade.

These types of race-baiting, dog whistling and antagonistic messages are not new to Sandpoint. When parents feel comfortable to repeat these messages in a parade aimed at entertaining children and families, their children are quick to

replicate. As students, we have been on the receiving end.

We are the ones who suffer when racist propaganda is left on our cars in the high school parking lot, when people shout racial slurs in the hallways, when our POC friends’ homes are vandalized, when students are allowed to wear clothing displaying the Confederate battle flag, when we are bullied online and in person, when someone “rolls coal” on us and says they’re trying to “turn us black,” when we are stalked by paramilitary members carrying assault rifles.

At the City Council meeting on July 1, parade organizer Ron Korn announced that he “saved

the Fourth of July parade,” and assured the council that “there is no agendas, there’s no special interest on our part … we’re not going to allow it.”

Despite these assurances, he allowed event participants to fly the Gadsden flag, a symbol that has been used by Confederate veterans, adopted by the Ku Klux Klan and is often seen as a symbol of white supremacist groups. He also allowed someone to display a “Blue Lives Matter” flag.

The statement of “Blue Lives Matter” is an alarming, dismissive response to “Black Lives Matter.”

Police officers chose to put on a blue uniform, to serve

Black. Lives. Matter.

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Mad about Science:

Brought to you by:

common phobias

By Brenden Bobby Reader Columnist We are all scared of things.

Losing our keys, the death of a loved one, or that little terrier that’s barking some horrible insults about your mother in dog language.

A phobia transcends what it means to be simply afraid of something. A phobia can take the air from your lungs, set your heart racing and instill a seemingly inescapable anxiety that can lead to an emotional and mental breakdown. The term phobia is used interchangeably with simple fear, which doesn’t do justice to people that suffer crippling anxiety when presented with a situation they are terrified by.

Phobias are a curious thing in human psychology. Someone may have a phobia of an event they’ve never experienced.

Certain phobias seem to have a genetic component present at birth, which could play into the idea of genetic memory. Genetic memory essentially means that we have some specific and complicated functions hard-coded into our DNA, passed on by untold millions of our ancestors. This idea was explored in the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, in which scientists probed the lead character’s DNA to search for clues to the location of long-hidden treasure and key events in history through the eyes of his ancestors.

A more likely source of most phobias is a negative experience during a major developmental period of our brains, such as early childhood. Our brains may not have fully understood the event at the time, but it was jarring enough to be scarred into 12 /

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our memory forever. An example would be if you had been bitten by a dog as a child, and suffered from cynophobia, or a crippling fear of dogs.

A third possible origin of phobias comes from one of our most powerful and destructive survival skills as a species: social learning. Humans are born storytellers. Look at any Facebook timeline: We regale our friends with our valiant expedition to retrieve a $5 frappe every Thursday, and the moment we receive bad service from the barista, our entire following learns and adapts to this information. This works especially well in scenarios where someone’s life is imperilled, such as an accident or an animal attack.

Unique to the last three generations of humankind is mass media. Our ability to tell stories and relay terrifying information to impart social learning is amplified a millionfold once you can broadcast it to an audience in a theater or on the internet. The movie, Jaws, is believed to have single-handedly instilled thalassophobia (fear of the sea) in an entire generation of moviegoers.

Enough about causation, let’s find out what thalassophobia means.

Thalassophobia — A fear of deep water, or what lurks beneath.

This is a fear that is commonly shared among most of humankind, not just because of a movie about a giant killer shark, but because we are naturally afraid of the unknown. Deep water represents everything that terrifies us to the core of our being: Not being able to see 20 feet ahead of us and having no idea whether or not something will destroy our entire existence just outside of our

view. This is a theme commonly explored by master of horror, H.P. Lovecraft, specifically in his Cthluhu mythos.

Claustrophobia — A fear of enclosed spaces, particularly with your hands stuck behind you.

That mere phrase to most can cause hyperventilation. My bad.

Claustrophobia is one of the most common phobias, and has been linked widely to a mechanism for dealing with childhood abuse, or a child’s way of processing a parent’s anxiety when the child is too young to understand the source of the adult’s problems. It is also often caused by a traumatic experience, such as being stuck on an airplane during turbulence or locked in an elevator that gets stuck between floors for an extended period of time.

Agoraphobia — Many perceive this to be the opposite of claustrophobia, but that’s not correct. Often described as a fear of open spaces, it’s actually very closely linked to claustrophobia and thalassophobia as a fear of lacking control; particularly in the ability to escape a bad situation. As an example, someone may avoid music concerts with thousands of people because they don’t have a clear escape route if a fire suddenly starts. Agoraphobia can often be a symptom of other emotional problems that manifest in a way that’s easier for the brain to understand.

Essentially, it can be the brain’s way of saying, “I cannot control so many things in my life, so if I avoid these situations, I take back control.” Unfortunately, this will sometimes devolve into a seemingly inescapable cycle, which has unfortunately been mocked in popular TV shows and

movies such as House, M.D. and Shameless.

Phobias are not easily conquered. Curing someone of thalassophobia isn’t as easy as pushing them into a lake — this is actually extremely dangerous.

The best way to conquer a phobia is with the support of people around you that you trust, who are willing to help face the phobia with you one step at a time, often with the help of a mental

health professional. Facing fear in a situation you have total control over is the first step to overcoming it.

If you need more help, you know where I’m going to point you: to a librarian. And if you suffer from bibliophobia (the fear of books), just give them a call. They’ll find all of the resources you need, and even hook you up with a library card when you’re ready.

Stay curious, 7B.

Random Corner ?

Don’t know much about music

We can help!

• Listening to music while working out measurably improves physical performance.

• Leo Fender, inventor of the Telecaster and Stratocaster, could not play guitar.

• You don’t like the original version of a song because it’s better.

You like it because it’s the one you heard first.

• Musicians have the same life expectancy as Zimbabweans: The lowest on earth.

• Warner Music collected more than $2 million in royalties in 2008 for public usage of the “Happy Birthday” song.

• Your favorite song is probably your favorite because you associate it with an emotional event in your life.

• None of The Beatles could read music. Neither could Jimi Hendrix.

• Your heartbeat changes and mimics the music you listen to.

• Flowers can grow faster by listening to music.

• Elvis Presley didn’t write any of his songs.

• The type of music you listen to affects the way you perceive the world.

• Barry Manilow didn’t write his song called “I Write the Songs.”

• The world’s most expensive musical instrument, a Stradivarius violin, was sold in 2011 for $15.9 million.

• The song “Jingle Bells” was originally written for Thanksgiving.

• Loud music can make a person drink more in less time.

• Music triggers activity in the same brain structure that releases the “pleasure chemical” dopamine, which is also active during sex and eating.

• For every $1,000 of music sold, the average musician makes just $23.40.

• Metallica is the first and only band to play on all seven continents.

• The piano Freddie Mercury plays in “Bohemian Rhapsody” is the same exact piano Paul McCartney plays in “Hey Jude.”

FEATURE

Campfire cooking for the gourmand

How to cook more than smokies and s’mores at your next campout wrap in foil and watch your hungry campmates line up.

By Ben Olson Reader Staff For many of us, camping means spending time with friends and family, howling at the moon and eating delicious campfire-cooked meals. After all, food always tastes better roasted over a fire under the stars.

While smokies and s’mores are the go-to for any campers (let’s face it, Woods jalapeño cheese smokies are basically a North Idaho food group of their own), there are a plethora of tips and tricks you can tap into that can turn your usual campfire fare into a full-blown gourmet meal.

Aluminum foil is the minimalist’s friend While packing for your upcoming campout, don’t forget the aluminum foil. It’s a cinch to prep foil-pack meals before leaving home, making dinner time as easy as tossing the packets on hot coals when your gang gets hungry.

When cooking with foil, it doesn’t hurt to wrap your meals twice to avoid burning, and always remember to seal the packets so the juices don’t dribble out when you flip them over.

Add water or oil to keep your meal from drying out.

Side dishes are especially easy to prepare using foil. One go-to is to line up green beans in a foil-pack with chopped garlic, olive oil and herbs. Same goes for baby potatoes, Brussels sprouts or anything, really — the sky’s the limit. After cooking, just crumple the foil packet so you can pack them out.

A grilling grate makes life easier Any campfire chef knows that cooking over a direct open flame is a no-no. While it may seem logical that the hottest part of the fire is the flames, it’s not exactly the case. To truly cook

an item over a campfire instead of just burning the outside, more consistent heat is necessary. The best bet is to rage your fire and build up white-hot coals, then pile them up under a grilling grate (you can prop up this grate between two rocks or, if it’s large enough, over the rocks around the fire).

It’s helpful to have a dedicated cooking area in your fire pit so you can move the coals over to this area while keeping the main fire burning and producing more coals to renew your cooking area’s heat source.

A grilling grate doesn’t have to be anything special — it can be as basic as an old oven rack, which can be found in area thrift stores for a buck or two.

Pro tip: Use the crumpled tin foil from your foil-pack meal to

clean the grate before or after cooking.

Embracing cast iron A good cast iron skillet or Dutch oven can last a lifetime, if you take care of it. These pans will never get ruined by the high temperatures of a fire, and if you season the iron well, the flavor produced by cast iron cooking is incredible.

If you only want to purchase one piece of cast iron for camping, consider a Dutch oven with a lid that transforms into a skillet or griddle. A good cast iron pot will have legs to keep its base elevated so coals can be placed beneath. Same goes with the lid.

There are endless recipes to create with cast iron. One is to place a whole chicken in a Dutch oven with some water and oil

in the bottom. Include onions, garlic, herbs and root vegetables, then place on the coals. Once placed, pack coals along the lid to give your chicken more of an even cooking. In 30-40 minutes, you’ll have a delicious, smoky roasted chicken that will make you wonder why you shoved hot dogs down your gullet for so many years.

Another excellent recipe is to brown a couple pounds of buffalo or organic, grass-fed ground beef in the Dutch oven, add onions and garlic and cook a bit longer. Then add some pinto beans and some taco seasoning and water. Take some rice that you cooked before leaving the house and warm some tortillas over the fire. Then spoon the mixture into your tortillas and add any vegetables you’d like,

Dessert can be more than s’mores Whoever invented the s’more should probably earn a Nobel Peace Prize or something. But why limit yourself on dessert options when there are so many different directions to take your taste buds?

One go-to for Dutch oven cookers is a dump cake, which is literally just a can of cherry pie filling, a packet of cake mix and a can of lemon-lime soda. Dump the pie filling in the bottom of the oven, and then pour over the cake mix and soda and place the lid on the oven. Use your nose or hunger to guide when it’s finished — it usually only takes about 20 minutes.

(Pro tip: Lining the Dutch oven with foil will help with cleanup later.)

Another super easy camp dessert is to cut open a banana longwise, insert milk chocolate squares inside and peanut butter if desired, then close the banana back up, wrap in foil and toss on the coals. When finished, peel open one side of the banana and spoon the dessert into your mouth while still warm. The banana takes on a pudding-like texture and is complemented nicely by the chocolate and peanut butter.

Speaking of s’mores, have you ever tried to change them up a bit? Instead of Hershey’s chocolate bars, what about a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? Or a York Peppermint Patty?

There are countless resources online for when you’d like to step up your game and impress your camping buddies. The main idea is to have fun while cooking and don’t settle for charred hot dogs when your campout has the potential to be an adventure for your taste buds, too.

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ArtWalk 2020 featured artist:

By Ben Olson Reader Staff

Lesley Gadsby

Pend Oreille Arts Council’s 43rd annual ArtWalk will host an opening reception starting at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, July 10 at 34 venues around downtown Sandpoint.

A Sandpoint favorite, this event highlights the work of local artists, pairing them with a participating business to showcase their work to the public.

POAC’s featured artist for ArtWalk 2020 is Naples artist Lesley Gadsby. Gadsby said she is largely a self-taught painter who often mixes media to achieve her desired results.

“My paintings are usually started in acrylic because it dries quickly and I can get my vision down in a fast and loose manner,” Gadsby said. “After that I will sometimes change to oil for the color and transparency, or add ink pastels, pencil or paper.”

Gadsby said she developed this mixed medium style simply because she likes to experiment. She said she is predominantly interested in contrast of color, visual texture and organic against inorganic objects.

“My sources of inspiration come from animals, people, places or gestures that I photograph,” she said. “I don’t think you ever stop growing [as an artist],” Gadbsy moved to Naples about eight years ago after starting her own business in Menlo Park, Calif., painting murals and gold leafing pieces of furniture to make them look old. She was an art major at the University of New Mexico and studied color and design at the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco. She has also taught both fine art painting and faux painting.

When chosen as this year’s featured artist for ArtWalk, Gadsby said she was a

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POAC featured artist Lesley Gadsby.

Photo courtesy POAC. little surprised.

“I was thrilled,” she said. “It was very nice of them. It’s such a good organization.

I’m grateful to belong to it. I’m grateful that there is something here like that. It needs to be supported by everyone.”

Gadsby’s paintings will be displayed at three different locations for ArtWalk: Ivano’s Ristorante, Eichardt’s Pub and the Music Conservatory of Sandpoint.

For a full list of venues, or for more information about ArtWalk, visit artinsandpoint.org. POAC encourages all those wishing to attend the opening reception on Friday, July 10 to wear masks and maintain social distance to help fight the spread of COVID-19.

Correction: In the June 25 article about ArtWalk, we inadvertently listed POAC’s Gallery located inside the Cedar St. Bridge.

This is their former location. POAC’s Gallery and office is now located inside the Music Conservatory of Sandpoint building at Main Street and Second Avenue.

I started this column two years ago as a place to ruminate on the interesting things I’d learned from sources that didn’t relate to the story I was writing about them. It was a place for awkward encounters, unprompted origin stories and other off-topic tidbits.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting work-from-home culture has limited my interviews to phone calls or emails, hindering my ability to collect superfluous information. These interactions are streamlined, and subtleties that help me peer into my source’s lives come from children yelling in the background, or intricately crafted email signatures.

While I used to simply skim over an inspirational quote at the end of a correspondence typed in a rainbow — frequently employing the Comic Sans font — details such as those now give me incredible insight into my sources. For instance, this person is probably fun-loving, has dogs, loves board games and fruity drinks.

I recently had someone respond to my inquiry, signing his email, “My best.” Not “best wishes” or “my regards,” but “my best.” Maybe it was my slightly exhausted state of mind, or the way the morning sun was coming through the window as I read the email, but that sign-off made me smile. My interviewee was giving me their “best,” and I felt it.

One email opening that remains constant in its severity — pandemic or not — is, “Per my last email …”

While I haven’t been on the receiving end very often — I’m prompt and thorough with my inbox, what can I say? — I have sent it more than once. The only difference now is that, while I used to imagine public information officers reading it at their desks while wearing fitted blazers, now I know they are cursing me from their dining room tables while dressed in their pajamas.

That’s OK. I am also in my pajamas, and I’m probably typing the email with one hand while the other holds a hot taquito, straight from the oven. Dare I say I could get used to this?

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HISTORY

Escape to the lake and the advent of tourism

By Chris Corpus and Hannah Combs Reader Contributors Laying her luggage on the bed (a real innerspring mattress, just like back home), she steps out the door and across the lawn to scope out a place for the children to swim. Satisfied that the water is shallow and calm, she slips off her shoes and lets her toes sink into the sand. In a minute, the children will find her, begging for brown cows, and vacation will stop feeling like vacation, but for this one moment she feels perfectly relaxed. A far cry from “going up to the lake” when she was a child.

At the time, the full day of clattering up the goat trail in her papa’s tin Lizzie was a special thrill, but with children of her own now, she shudders at the thought. As she glances back at the sign over the entrance to the cabins, the white wooden letters spelling Lakeshore Tourist Park hang calmly against the clear blue sky. She fills with warmth, unsure if it’s from the sun glowing above her, or her gratitude for the modern amenities that have finally reached this remote corner of her world.

Big city families have escaped to North Idaho’s lakes for

The Lakeshore Tourist Park, located where the Edgewater Resort is now. This photo was taken during the 1940s. Courtesy Bonner County History Museum.

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more than 100 years, but it was not always as easy as it is today.

Up until the 1920s, the railroads offered summer passenger service to the many lakes east of Spokane. Escaping the summer heat, Spokane families headed to Coeur d’Alene and Liberty Lake. Spurs to Hayden Lake later enticed the well-heeled to enjoy a lake with protected forested shores, selling property that included golf along with boating and fishing.

The passenger rail eventually brought vacationers to Bayview on Lake Pend d’Oreille. Here, travelers could find steamboat service to camps at Whiskey Rock, Talache, Garfield Bay, Camp Bay, Glengary, Sandpoint, and Hope.

The lure of outdoor recreation and an escape from the crowded city life accelerated travel to the Idaho Panhandle.

Still, tourism in Sandpoint remained sparse, even with the advent of the fabled “tin Lizzie” Model T. The road from Coeur d’Alene to Canada earned the sobriquet “goat trail,” lacking

a hard surface, prone to potholes and too narrow around curves for comfortable car travel. Even Canadians entering at Eastport noted the degradation of the road once they crossed the border.

Changing the name of the road from US 10 Alternate to US 95 attracted federal and state funding to improve the road, starting with a hard surface in the 1930s.

Widespread use of the automobile changed tourism and recreation permanently. Crowds came en masse from the metropolitan area of Spokane, but the east to west Hwy. 200 brought cross country travelers through Sandpoint. Gas stations, car mechanics, motels, and cottage camps blossomed, along with a new business, auto camps.

Car travel magazines heralded Sandpoint and its lake as a destination for families, featuring fishing, boating, camping, hunting, and swimming. Not to be missed was a “remarkable two mile long wooden bridge that links to the little log-

ging town of Sandpoint.” Besides summer fun, they recommended traveling during the fall when the colors were worth the challenging drive.

From the beginning, civic and state leaders emphasized the natural beauty and clean water of the North Idaho lakes. The fabled fishing of Lake Pend d’Oreille reached all the way to southern California. The Chamber of Commerce worked with local legendary writer and photographer, Jim Parsons and Ross Hall, to attract even more tourists. World record catches of the Dolly Varden trout, Kamloops, and the abundance of Kokanee became big stories in newspapers and sport magazines.

Auto camps popped up on downtown lots and in yards on the edges of town, but visitors began looking for an experience, not just a place to sleep on the ground. By the late 1940’s, 27 resorts and motels appeared along the shores of Lake Pend d’Oreille, and among the most popular was the Lakeshore Tourist Park, which flourished next to the Sandpoint city beach. Their neon sign directed travelers to go east on First Avenue for two blocks,

then through the Northern Pacific Viaduct. The park featured eight completely modern cabins with toilet and wash bowls, kitchens, and a good mattress on every bed.

It boasted a fine bathing beach and bath house. It helped that civic leaders solved the problem of the annual spring floods by cleaning up driftwood debris and raising the level of the beach.

On the bones of the Lakeshore now resides the Edgewater Resort, where 75 years later, visiting parents still take in the view across the lake, sink their toes in the sand and dream about a peaceful day on the beach sans children.

Research courtesy of the Bonner County History Museum and Nancy Renk. The beginning of this article has been fictionalized based on historic facts.

LITERATURE

Free library for the people

By Chris Park Reader Contributor I’m a person who loves to lose myself within the pages of a good book. The outside world quickly fades away as well crafted words and soulful sentences transport me to another time and place. I love books, and books of all kinds: fiction feeds my imagination, history guides me in understanding current events more clearly, biographies and autobiographies convey the lives of fascinating people, and non-fiction provides an endless supply of new study subjects.

There are infinite topics available in an endless number of books.

Well, I thought books were endless.

When our public libraries closed down due to the nasty pestilence that invaded our lives and world late this past winter, strolling the aisles of the public library was no longer an option. Second-hand stores, shelves bursting with cheap novels, were closed. Bookstores closed down and my formerly spontaneous visits to a friend’s bookshelves were now off limits. Doors were fast closing to bibliophiles. Everyone by now had turned to downloading books online, but not me — no internet or cell service at my house. Going to town to download anything is a major inconvenience. Besides, I’m one who prefers the feel of a book: the heft of well-read, dog-eared pages that settle comfortably into my hands. Soon, I was facing a real shortage of reading material.

Enter the free library — a global happening whereby ordinary folks provided the public with a bookshelf, which took on all variety of design and location, from simple to stunning, to be used as a local book exchange.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, either.

For generations, sailors and other travelers have been leaving books behind in various ports of call to share with those to come. Take a book, leave a book; it’s a wonderful example of recycling.

Once while traveling, my wife and I were delighted to discover a treasure trove of books smartly shelved under a

An intellectual bird ponders the selection at the free library located on the boardwalk near Misty Mountain Furniture. Courtesy photo. date palm in a remote desert oasis. We’ve also come across intentional book stashes in backcountry cabins, in alleys, at trailheads, at hostels and on random streets in random towns. Now, I keep several books specifically for exchange when we travel in case we stumble upon a free library.

As it turns out, Sandpoint has a few of these little free libraries squirreled away on different streets and they were my savior during the shutdown.

With the free time afforded us during the stay-at-home days this spring, my wife and I embarked on our own free library project and now are ready to strike the proverbial champagne bottle to the bow of our new readership. No, it’s not a free library resembling a boat like the one you can find on Fourth Avenue. Instead, it’s a bird themed, three-shelfer built using recycled materials that we recently installed on the boardwalk of the Misty Mountain Furniture building, located on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Cedar Street.

Although we’ve already got a good start, we’ll need your help to fully stock the shelves. I hope you’ll find (or leave behind) a great page-turner. Happy reading!

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events July 9 - 16, 2020

THURSDAY, JUly 9

Idaho PUC’s Virtual Workshop on Avista • 3-5pm @ idahogov.webex.com Idaho Conservation League hosts this public workshop to discuss Avista’s long-term plans for electricity generation. Password is: July9Meeting. Or call (415) 655-0001 and enter access code 133 529 9901 Live Music w/ Kevin Dorin 6-8pm @ MickDuff’s Beer Hall

FriDAY, JUly 10

ArtWalk Opening Reception 5:30pm @ Various venues in Sandpoint Celebrate POAC’s 43rd annual ArtWalk at 34 different venues around Sandpoint.

Check out artinsandpoint.org for more info

Live Music w/ Bright Moments Jazz 5-8pm @ Pend d’Oreille Winery Live Music w/ Baker/Thomas/Packwood 6:30-9:30pm @ MickDuff’s Beer Hall Live Music w/ Kevin Dorin 8-10pm @ The Back Door

SATURDAY, JUly 11

Sandpoint Farmers’ Market 9am-1pm @ Farmin Park The Market is back at Farmin Park!

Live Music w/ Okay, Honey 5-8pm @ Pend d’Oreille Winery Live Music w/ Brian Jacobs 6:30-9:30pm @ MickDuff’s Beer Hall

Live Music w/ Bright Moments Jazz 8-10pm @ The Back Door Live Music w/ John Firshi 6pm @ Eichardt’s Pub Live Music w/ Ten String Smile 6-9pm @ Matchwood Brewing Co. Feat. Drew Browne and Pam Burns Live Music w/ Chris Lynch 8-10pm @ The Back Door

SunDAY, JUly 12

Piano Sunday with Tom Pletscher 3-5pm @ Pend d’Oreille Winery

monDAY, JUly 13

Monday Night Blues Jam w/ Truck Mills 7pm @ Eichardt’s Pub

Lifetree Cafe 2pm @ Jalapeño’s Restaurant

tuesDAY, JUly 14

wednesDAY, JUly 15

Hope Community Mixer 4-6pm @ Memorial Community Center Tickets $15 (inc. appetizer plate); beer/ wine available for purchase. 208-264-5481

Live Music w/ John Firshi 6pm @ Eichardt’s Pub

Sandpoint Farmers’ Market 3-5:30pm @ Farmin Park The Market is back at Farmin Park!

ThursDAY, JUly 16

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COMMUNITY

Annie Gassman honored as FSPW volunteer of the year

By Reader Staff

Annie Gassman is one of those people who prefers action over talk.

Over the years, she’s put that attitude to work volunteering for Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness, educating and informing people about our wild backyard. Her volunteer work is extensive, which is exactly why she’s the FSPW Old Goat of 2020.

Announced at the annual State of the Scotchmans event June 2 — hosted this year over an internet live stream — the Old Goat award is the highest FSPW volunteer honor.

Gassman plays a pivotal role in the Winter Tracks program in Lincoln County, Mont., spreading an appreciation for nature in the process. She’s shared her knowledge of wilderness through guided hikes. Her welcoming personality at the Kootenai Harvest Festival, on top of the work she puts in on the planning committee, shows her commitment to the community.

Gassman is the epitome of a volunteer of the year. With a nod to Mr. Scotchman, the iconic monarch of the mountains, FSPW calls its highest award recipient the “Old Goat,” reflecting the spirit of our volunteers — not necessarily their age or attitude.

While Gassman’s award was the high-

Annie Gassman is Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness’ Old Goat of 2020. Courtesy photo. light of the evening, there were plenty of reasons to catch the State of the Scotchmans. The event honored other valued volunteers, including John and Susan Harbuck, Anick Baribeau, Katie RabornDale, Irv McGeachy, Matt Nykiel, Howard and Connie Shay, and Ed Robinson.

FSPW Executive Director Phil Hough updated attendees on the work the Friends have undertaken amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes the new wilderness podcast, Your Wild Place, available to download or stream at scotchmanpeaks.org/podcast. FSPW Program Coordinator Autumn Lear explained how the Friends are organizing a summer trails and volunteer season with safety and productivity in mind.

To be a part of FSPW’s summer season, visit scotchmanpeaks.org.

STAGE & SCREEN

Panida pleads for financial support amid pandemic

By Lyndsie Kiebert Reader Staff The Panida Theater released a fundraising letter July 1, calling for support to make it through the remainder of 2020 as the well-loved community landmark feels the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the letter, signed by theater staff and board members, the “immediate task is to raise $41,350 to bridge the operations gap for the next 6 months and bring back staff who have been laid off.”

“Your support is critical during this unprecedented time and we need a contribution to make sure our community landmark survives this crisis,” the letter reads.

Panida Executive Director Patricia Walker told the Sandpoint Reader that the staff has “made the difficult decision” to limit the number of upcoming events in favor of focusing on rentals, applying for financial assistance and rolling out their Star Member VIPS — Very Important Panida

Sustainers — program.

“We don’t have any money to risk right now,” Walker said, “so until attendance can come up, it’s difficult.”

In the meantime, patrons are encouraged to make donations, purchase memberships and gift certificates, talk to legislators about arts funding and share the Panida’s letter with friends. Walker said the theater also has an endowment fund in the works that people can request to become a part of.

Walker said there are some fundraising events in the works, although the details aren’t yet pinned down. One such event will be a concert put on by the Shook Twins — Sandpoint sister singer-songwriters Katelyn and Laurie Shook, who have been vocal about their love for the theater and desire to help. Laurie told the Reader that she and Katelyn are working with Walker to set a date in late August, and that all proceeds will benefit the theater. However, depending on the state of the pandemic in North Idaho, the event

may need to be held online and donations solicited digitally.

The financial impact the theater has on the entire downtown core is a driving force behind keeping the doors open, Walker said.

“Offerings at the Panida help support both area events and local businesses,” Panida board member Lenny Hess told the Reader. “It is critical to our local economy and our community spirit for the Panida to continue to survive and thrive during these challenging times. We can get through this, but not without continued support from the community.”

The Panida’s pandemic-spurred call for help comes after a turbulent start to 2020, when a Feb. 19 board meeting played host to a full house of concerned citizens who shared worries about the theater’s amenities, fundraising strategy and financial tracking.

One such citizen was Susan Bates-Harbuck, a former board member and “Panida Mom” who played an integral role in saving the building from demolition in

the 1980s. She said the current situation is “possibly the worst financial straits [the theater has] been in since the [Black Diamond] Cattle Company owned it back in ’85, when we first bought it.”

“The way it survived then is the way it’s going to survive now, and that’s just by the generous donations and support from the community,” Bates-Harbuck said.

Walker said the board has been working through the concerns voiced back in February.

“We reviewed everything that people said,” Walker said. “The sad part is that we always need feedback — they don’t have to wait for a board meeting.”

Walker said the best way to contact the theater would be by emailing board@panida.org. She noted that “it’s always more helpful to point out solutions,” than to point out “problems.”

The Panida is also in the midst of recruiting new board members and volunteers. Walker said she has received a “strong turnout” of applications, which she’s hoping

will lead to some rejuvenated committees.

“There needs to be more people on [the committees] so they can be more active,” Walker said.

“We’ve had some great new faces come along, who I think will bring some new energy.”

Bates-Harbuck said there are at least four former Panida board members seeking seats, and that they could bring “much-needed experience to the theater.”

The board will hold elections at its September board meeting, for which a date has not yet been set. In the meantime, that $41,350 goal to sustain basic operating costs is at the forefront of the theater’s concerns.

“The Panida is a cherished icon of downtown. Many people have entered its doors and performed on stage,” Panida Board President Robert Moore told the Reader. “Without the financial support, the doors could be closed, the stage dark.”

Contact and support the Panida at panida.org.

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OUTDOORS

Dirt-y Secrets

An introductory column on gardening

By Ranel Hansen Reader Columnist I am Ranel Hanson. You might know me from my years as the owner of Zany Zebra or from my previous years as an admissions/marketing consultant for special purpose high schools.

I have retired those vocations to quarantine in my garden.

I have an interest in gardening, specifically flowers. I want to cover the world (or at least my yard) with as many budding, blooming things as I possibly can. Being an older person with a lot of gardening years behind me, I have learned some things that might help you, if you haven’t already discovered them for yourself. This is not to say that I am an expert. I am, at best, a hobby gardener.

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Every month I will be appearing in the Reader with a few hints for my fellow flower lovers.

I also am way into bees.

Specifically, Mason Bees. They don’t sting, they don’t make honey, they don’t make hives and every female is a queen.

What they do — and better than practically any other pollen seeker — is pollinate. They are the Beyoncé of the pollinators. We will talk more about these amazing insects later. They deserve a whole column.

I will also include tips from other local gardeners. There is a whole community of energetic and creative folks who grow flowers and vegetables for the pure joy of it and who love to share what they know. I grow flowers and buy vegetables

from the farmers at the local Farmer’s Market, but you can certainly do both.

Now, let’s get to it.

It is summer after a wet spring, so let’s talk about weeds and slugs.

Weeding is not something you do once and call it good. No, it is a never-ending Eggshells and salt sprinkled around your leafy greens helps prevent slugs. Courtesy photo. summer job — but, it is also meditative and so Most of the time, they break.

An added observation about satisfying when you see a clean That is why weeding is a constant weeding: It puts you in touch, bed. pastime in summer. There are so close up, to your flowers and First, water deeply the night many kinds of weeds and, after your soil. The insects are right before you weed. Get up early all, they are just unloved flowers. there, too. Butterflies, bees, ladyand gather your tools: trowel, Clover, dandelions, hawkweed, bugs and earthworms are all there bucket or box, knee pads or horsetail — all are pretty but not to be appreciated and cared for. one of those cool welcome in the garden.

So, pull Please don’t be tempted to use benches that you them, dig them, whatever it takes herbicides or pesticides. They are can kneel or sit because they will suck the nutripoison for the birds, the bees, the on. I like a trowel ents and water away from your other insects, your pets and you. with one serrated beloved flowers.

They travel to our lake, too. It’s edge.

Throw the weeds in your more work to dig up weeds but Ideally, you bucket and throw them away.

I oh so much healthier for everywant to dig out the keep them out of the compost pile one. root of the weed because the pile sometimes isn’t Now, slugs. They are creayou’re attacking. hot enough to kill weed seeds. tures just trying to make a living.

But not on my primroses, zinnias, hostas or dahlias.

Oh, I know. Beer in a shallow dish to drown the little buggers. Not my method. I don’t want to dispose of the drowned slug bodies in the morning and it seems like a waste of perfectly good beer.

Here’s what I do: I save my egg shells all winter and beyond. I throw them in a bucket after rinsing them in water. Then, when I see slugs, I add some Epsom salts to the bucket and crush it all up together. Sprinkle liberally around your plants.

The egg shells discourage them, but the salt makes them disappear.

And, your plants will love the salt.

MUSIC

‘One note at a time’

Singer-songwriter John Firshi aims to cultivate connection in North Idaho

By Lyndsie Kiebert Reader Staff When John Firshi performs, a conversation takes place.

It’s happening between Firshi and his guitar — the rise and the fall of notes bringing to life the experiences of the man behind the finger-picking and strumming.

Ideally, Firshi said, the conversation also extends from the musician to his listener. Music is a form of communication, the Naples-based singer-songwriter said.

“Music, to me, is about the emotion, and the communication of emotion that goes beyond normal language,” he said.

Though he loved music all his life, Firshi said he didn’t delve into making his own at an early age because he felt it was “out of reach.” When he did begin to play the guitar at 22 years old, Firshi said he was “bitten by the bug.”

“It captured my attention, captured my heart and my interest,” he said. “I haven’t been able to put it down ever since.

It’s what keeps me happy and healthy.”

Jazz, blues and jam bands like Grateful Dead influenced

Sandpoint residents in the 40-and-older age bracket might remember the curious incident of Willie Nelson’s concert in a farmer’s field south of town. My recollection is vague, but it seems that I was about 14, which would have made the year 1994. I do remember the phone call alerting my parents of Nelson’s tour bus sighted on U.S. 95 and their hasty scrambling to slip the bonds of parenthood and hit the road for Cocollala.

To me, and maybe my little brother, that experience made

READ

The summer 2020 Sandpoint Magazine hit local grocery store racks the last week of June, and it’s a beautiful issue. The main feature is about exploring North Idaho’s mountains, for which I contributed a story on rock scrambling — not quite rock climbing, but more physically demanding than hiking. Reader Publisher Ben Olson also had some work published in the issue. Grab a copy, or check it out at sandpointmagazine.com.

LISTEN

Firshi’s current sound, which leaves room for improvisation — also known as an opportunity for the musician to “stretch,” Firshi said.

“You’re taking a risk,” he said, “but when it works out, it’s really gratifying.”

The one-man act uses a loop pedal to add layers of baseline and melody to his songs, creating a groove before incorporating some freestyle jamming.

Though he didn’t sing very often when he first began to play — relying more heavily on the emotions expressed exclusively through his instrumental work — he said he’s been singing

more lately thanks to growing confidence.

“It’s been an evolutionary process,” Firshi said.

The final result is acoustic music with soul and depth, going beyond simply a man and a guitar to become an attempt at bridging the gap between stage and audience. Firshi said that when someone approaches him after a gig to express joy about his performance, it “really ties it all together” for him, because he knows that the conversation — created through his music — has continued.

“I discovered a way to fit into my world and be part of my community, my society and part

Snow + guitar + beard = John Firshi.

Courtesy photo. of my culture … [I] got the feeling that I was playing some sort of a role by taking the initiative to express myself through music, and I was hopefully adding to the conversation,” he said. “My sincere goal would be to make things better in this world if I can, one note at a time.”

John Firshi will play Eichardt’s Pub on Saturday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 22, both shows starting at 6 p.m. Listen to his music and contact him at johnfirshi.com.

Willie Nelson, at 87, releases 70th solo album First Rose of Spring

By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff

This week’s RLW by Lyndsie Kiebert

Willie Nelson something of a demigod — who else could grace us with a visitation that would pull our parents from our homes on a promise spread by party line? I knew Teddy Roosevelt had once visited Sandpoint — I saw his picture, waving from the back of a train, hanging up at Safeway. This seemed like just as big a deal.

That was a long time ago, but Willie Nelson’s star wattage hasn’t dimmed a bit. Now in his 87th year, the man is still touring and still recording — releasing his 70th solo album on July 3, titled First Rose of Spring.

The title track sounds and feels

like a melancholic benediction, filled with bittersweet wisdom. All the other cuts, as with “First Rose of Spring,” are written by other artists or produced in collaboration with Nelson — as is the case with “Blue Star” and “Love Just Laughed.” Yet, Nelson stamps every song with his signature warmth and winsome tenor. Listening to him in (almost) his ninth decade, he seems as vital and timeless as ever, and somehow braver-sounding than his fellow country-western artists.

While so many fellow “cowboys” trade in false bravado, Nelson comes again and again with

a sense of strength made stronger for its vulnerability. (I mean, Stardust? I may play Chopin, Lizst and Satie on the piano, but when I dance with my mom at my wedding, it’s to Willie Nelson.)

Americans may not have much in common these days — or want to have much in common — but God help us, Willie Nelson has something for everyone.

Singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx is just getting started.

Her 2018 debut I Need to Start a Garden features eight tracks made great by her enchanting lyrics. On “The Bug Collector,” Heynderickx’s vocals are layered over a sweeping guitar and horn melody, belting out a second-person story of mental illness. She delves into indie rock territory with the catchy track “Oom Sha La La,” and attempts to touch the listener’s soul with “Show You a Body.” I can’t wait to see what else she creates.

WATCH

The rage-driven tenacity of Ashley Judd as Libby Parsons in the 1999 film Double Jeopardy is what makes the film so memorable. After being wrongfully accused of her husband’s murder, Parsons spends seven years in prison before earning parole and setting out to find her very much alive and scheming husband, and to reunite with her son. It’s an enthralling, heart-wrenching mystery-turned-action film.

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PERSPECTIVES The

From Northern Idaho News, July 19, 1915

BOTTLE BAY ROAD STILL IN THE AIR COUNTY BOARD WILL SPEND $12,000 IF FEASIBLE ROUTE IS SHOWN

A large delegation of Sandpoint business men representing the Commercial club and also farmers from the peninsula, interviewed the county commissioners with regard to the Sandpoint-Bottle Bay road which has been agitated for some time. Commissioner McBride was taken over the proposed route Sunday by Archie O’Donnell of Glengary and expressed the opinion that a road could not be built for the money claimed.

There was a great deal of discussion pro and con. Commissioner McBride expressing a willingness to vote for a $12,000 appropriation if the farmers and the Commercial club would first blaze out a rote along which a roadway 12 feet wide, with not to exceed an eight per cent grade, could be built.

The matter was finally left with the understanding that the Commercial club and the farmers would pick out hte road and have it surveyed, when, if the survey is satisfactory, the county engineer will go over the work and if the conditions set out are fulfilled the county board will spend $12,000 for the road.

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Late Night Buddhist

Stop Making Sense

By Scott Taylor Reader Columnist You may have seen a cartoon similar to this somewhere: A man in a doctor’s office waves his arm around wildly and says, “Doc it hurts when I do this.”

To which the doctor replies, “Then don’t do that.”

Someone recently asked me, “What got you into studying Buddhism in the first place?” This took me a bit by surprise and I said I’d have to think on that one for a while. I have to think on most things for a while. I’m not exactly a quick decision maker; ask the frustrated people in my life.

I’m more used to, “How long have you been growing your hair?” My standard answer to that is, “I’ve been growing my hair ever since I was born.” So far nobody’s been forward enough to reply, “You’re quite a smartass, aren’t you?”

Well, I try. It’s one of my hobbies.

I can’t remember exactly when or why I started studying Buddhist philosophy, but I do remember that when I began reading it, my first reaction was that everything it said rang true to my inner self.

Buddhism is very trendy in the “Let’shold-these-crystals-and-burn-some-sageand-cure-the-world’s-problems” crowd, but that’s not really me.

It can also be very attractive to those of us who, due to misinterpretation, want to excuse ourselves from being human.

I’ve been accused more than once —

STR8TS Solution

by romantic partners, of course — of being “unfeeling, unemotional or [gasp] cold-hearted.”

It’s not that studying Buddhist principles makes us unemotional; it’s that it teaches us not to let those emotions rule us. Even the Dalai Lama feels sadness, loss, anger and frustration, but he recognizes these and doesn’t let them direct him to decisions.

I remember reading a few years ago — I don’t recall the source and can’t verify this — that at one point the Texas educational system banned schools from teaching about Buddhism in social studies classes because it was “too attractive to young people.”

We wouldn’t want young people becoming too well-adjusted, content and peaceful.

What attracted me to Buddhist thought was the truth in it; the guiding idea that we all want to be happy, and there is a way to achieve that state. It was so matter-of-fact, so simple, and so rooted in actual experience and scientific principle (the Dalai Lama once said “If science should ever prove a Buddhist concept to be false, then Buddhism will have to change) that it was a revelation to me.

I often illustrate it with this thought: “What happens if you hit your thumb with a hammer?”

“It hurts!”

“Exactly! So don’t hit your thumb with a hammer.”

This, of course, is a simplification, but that’s one of the things that caught my attention in the first place.

So what’s the point of all this? Is it to try and convince others to take up Buddhist study? Not at all. It’s that the world could surely use more peaceful, well-adjusted, content people right now, and we should all find a path to follow that rings true to us and leads us to that state.

The answer doesn’t lie in a single religion or school of thought. When asked if everyone should become Buddhist, the Dalai Lama commented that, no, people should follow their own cultural traditions and religions if those lead to peacefulness and happiness.

Find a path that rings true in your heart and walk it. And be happy!

Crossword Solution

Sudoku Solution I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon was free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand, pretending he’s throwing up, is not what I call hospitality.

Solution on page 22

Solution on page 22

By Bill Borders

ACROSS

1. Line of a poem 6. S S S S 11. Tests 12. Put away a knife or sword 15. A colored wax stick for drawing 16. Skittered 17. Belief 18. Relevant 20. Henpeck 21. Tastes 23. Klutz’s cry 24. Brute 25. ___ slaw 26. Nobleman 27. Assist in crime 28. 1 1 1 1 29. East southeast 56. Handcuff 30. Passionate 57. Lift 31. School terms 58. Excrete 34. Come up 59. Anagram of “Diets” 36. 19th letter of the /ih-gal-i-TAIR-ee-uhn/ Greek alphabet [adjective] 37. Notion 1. asserting, resulting from, or characterized by belief 41. Horn sound of the in the equality of all people, especially in political, 42. Hairless DOWN economic, or social life.

43. Cans “She took with her to the office an egalitarian approach to race relations.”

1. Variant 44. Cold-shoulder 2. Ideal 45. Leader 3. Beam 46. Cartoon bear 4. Dirty air 47. Damp Corrections: In the June 25 edition of the Reader, I accidentally listed 5. Feudal worker 48. Coward POAC’s address at their old location on Cedar St. Bridge. POAC office 6. Break out 51. Knave and their gallery is now located at Main St. and Second Ave. inside the 7. Avoids 52. First letters Music Conservatory of Sandpoint building. Apologies for the error. -BO 8. Arid 54. Affirm

egalitarian

Word Week

Copyright www.mirroreyes.com

Laughing Matter

CROSSWORD

Solution on page 22 9. Hearing organ 10. A wasp has one 13. Robust 14. Border 15. A type of cold water 16. Chimneys 19. Awaken 22. Conference 24. Overweight 26. A territorial unit of Greece 27. Carriage 30. A bitter quarrel 32. Eastern Standard Time 33. Stories

34. Goddess of wisdom 35. Workaday 38. Bishopric 39. Betrothed 40. Comment to the audience 42. A gun projectile 44. Breaststroke 45. Instrument indicators 48. Rodents 49. Paddles 50. ___ du jour = Meal of the day 53. Children’s game 55. 52 in Roman numerals July 9, 2020 / R / 23