Conscious Choice: Water, Water Everywhere

October 2007 | Escape the Pace

Water, Water Everywhere

Idaho offers up a lake lover’s Eden

By Crai S. Bower

To be honest, there is little I miss about the East Coast, other than the lakes. Every state has them, accessible chains of water, warmed by the sun, inviting a quick dip or languorous afternoon spent submerged among the merpeople. The coastal Northwest certainly offers fresh water, yet we have nowhere close to “The Finger Lakes” (NY) or “Belgrade Lakes” (Maine). Step out of Washington to northern Idaho, however, and you’ll discover a lake lover’s Eden.

I know I’m not alone in connoting northern Idaho with renegade militiamen and white supremacists. I used to dash across the panhandle, worried that some neo-nazi would force my ’69 VW bus off the road, lop off my hair, and then my head. The jungles were alive with more than Sasquatch, and I wanted no part in arboreal explorations.

The truth, as always with ignorance and bias, could hardly be more different, as Sandpoint, the region’s hub, provides an alternative oases populated with casual cafés, outdoor hardcores, holistically centric families, and one luscious farmers’ market.

But this mossy panhandle should be held over a campfire, not in town. So grab your chai and head to the woods. Nowhere is more graphically verdant than northern Idaho; it offers a dizzying array of wilderness experiences. And the Idaho State Parks website couldn’t be more user-friendly—a point-and-click reservation system allows you to pick your exact campsite or cabin location.

We spend a day at Round Lake, a camping-only state park that tends to be quieter than the larger state parks like Ferragut Park on Lake Pend Oreille to the south and Priest Lake Park to the north. I lead my boys through the ponderosa pines and Douglas firs down to the docks for a little good ole fishin’, though my eldest son recoils at the night crawler’s fate and opts for a walk around the small lake in search of anything breathing and slimy. My three-year-old casts away with abandon, landing a blue gill and small bass, holding the little prizes momentarily before releasing them back into the lake.

A cabin’s sole purpose should be to provide reinforced nighttime shelter. I question a cabin during sun-drenched and star-saturated times, when the biting insects scarcely appear and a tent would work just fine. That said, a good rustic cabin allows for memorable stories of midnight mice scurries and offers that familiar “cabin smell” that can transport many of us back to our “at camp” days.

We hear no critters inside our temporary domicile, but calls of the night fill an aural reality show roster, a who’s who of nocturnal fauna. The great horned owl is first to call, its low hoots are lazy as its throne on the dark night’s food chain is high. The barred owls add chorus as a loon takes the tenor lead. The loon’s solitary trill does not prepare us for the eerie, insane and foreboding shouts and barks of the coyotes, who throw their voices with such accuracy, they awaken my shivering children and send them sprinting into my bed. As the chorus of canine wraiths achieves fevered pitch, I’m glad we opted for the cabin.

The sun clears away the night’s shivers and we plot our final day in the northern forests. There are rental canoes and kayaks on virtually every lake. We paddle through the reeds as two great blue heron take bemused flight. I imagine white water kayaking with the bairns when they hit their teens, skipping the expert Priest River perhaps to navigate the intermediate Pack River. We’ll also traverse one of a dozen mountain bike trails that trace the sluices of the Selkirk, Cabinet and Green Monarch Mountains. Today we explore as pedestrians, following trails toward Copper Falls and then Snow Falls, still descending mirthfully in the late summer drought.

Three-thousand miles to the east, the mountains fold into each other silently, the rivers long since tamed. But here in Washington, wanderings demand ascents, plateaus and descents. We spy cerulean lakes hidden behind volcanic sentinels, but usually from 30,000 feet. However, drive five hours to the east into Idaho and you’re a swim in the valley of water—each lake more inviting and familiar than the last.

Crai Bower discusses “Escaping the Pace” as a regular contributor on KUOW’s
The Beat. Visit www.FlowingStreamWriting.net for more information about Bower’s travels and commentaries.

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