skookum photography

Fishing for the birds

2012-01-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

Spawned female kokanee salmon on lake's edge in January/Ralph BartholdtFor years, Gregory Johnston has come for the birds.Each winter around Christmas he travels from his Rathdrum home to Wolf Lodge Bay looking for bald eagles, snapping pictures and selling the images to stock agencies.It's an annual ritual for many local photographers, from novices to pros.The pros, like Johnston, set their tripods and mega lenses tipped with cameras, on places where they will get the best light and the best all around chance for killer shots of Lake Coeur d'Alene's bald eagles as they swoop down to catch landlocked salmon near the lake surface."After you've done this a while you kind of read what the eagles are about to do, and you know to be ready for a shot,"Johnston said.He and many fellow pros prefer a particular point at the entrance of Beauty Bay just over the steel railing of Highway 97 where the land drops to the flat surface of the lake."We call this the $70,000 Club," he said. "Some of our tripods cost more than a camera."Despite more eagles and the comeback of the lake's salmon population, Johnston has seen fewer eagles swooping across the stage in front of the $70,000 Club."This year hasn't been as good as last year, and the year before that was even better," he said. "A lot of the eagles are staying in the trees across the bay, and there are a few over on Higgins Point."Jack Cotter of Otis Orchards doesn't mind that there are fewer birds close by.He doesn't notice.

He is a newbie to eagle watching and for now, just enjoys being on the shore watching the birds flap by out of his camera's range."I bought a new lens and thought I'd come out and try it," he said.Eagle watching on Coeur d'Alene Lake's north end is a good way to spend a few hours in the chill, or to enjoy unseasonably warm weather.Either way, it's a great idea, Cotter said.The eagles flock to the northeastern part of the lake at Wolf Lodge Bay following great schools of kokanee salmon, a small landlocked version of the the sockeye or red salmon that spend the summer migrating to the lake's north end to spawn either in the streams, or along the gravelly shoreline.Once the fish are in shallows, it's meal time for the eagles.A wildlife biologist with the Bureau of Land Management counted 259 eagles - 215 adults and 44 juveniles recently.According to Idaho Fish and Game, the number of adult kokanee spawning in Lake Coeur d'Alene has risen dramatically in the past three years.Fish and Game counted 33,900 spawning kokanee in 2006; 34,000 in 2007; 28,000 in 2008; 333,600 in 2009, and 506,200 in 2010.This year, it's estimating the adult kokanee spawning number will reach 767,000.A kokanee's three-year life cycle ends around December as females lay eggs and males fertilize the eggs. After spawning, the fish die and float to the surface of the water, creating an abundant food source for the eagles.Most of the eagles’ fishing takes place during the early morning. Some feeding occurs throughout the day."It's winding down for the season," Johnston said. "I will probably come out for another week or so."And then the spawning dance of the fish and the eagle's feeding frenzy will be over until next winter. —Ralph Bartholdt

Tracking

2011-11-18T19:30:00.000-08:00

Tracking, 500 yards in 5 hours/Ralph Bartholdt

So there it was.
Plain as night’s fast approach.
As the dearth of snow.
Plain as distance – as in too far, or time’s outpacing what was once considered sort of a gift, a solid streak of good luck, or the ability to pencil wind, yardage and bullet drop into a Sudoku block.
The buck was broad and two swales out.
It was a criss-cross moon we call it. The time when the moon’s magnetic pull loosens the muscles and slows the reflexes of big deer as if it were martini hour.
It gets them in the open shedding their boardroom ties and donning cackles like drunken pirates.
It’s up to you to pull the trigger then.
Criss-cross moons are when most Pope and Young animals are harvested. It’s the time to be in the woods.
I had slithered past two does who saw me hunched in a thicket of goldenrod, the flowers gone to seed and the blooms turned from honey to chocolate.
They stared my way as I inched downwind and around a peninsula of buckthorn and elderberry bushes that bent heavily over the trail I had chosen for its noiselessness.
When I made pasture’s edge, I rose to my feet out of their sight and moved quickly toward my starting point, the place I had spent an hour rattling and calling earlier, before the sun cracked the clouds like lava breaching basalt, slipping into the wide open sky like a volleyball on fire.
Here was the memory of a warm autumn slowly disappearing behind a mountain, casting the late afternoon in umber.
I hurried along the trail and saw the buck.
I stopped.
His head was down. He nudged a side hill,browsing the last green shoots that clung to the warm soil under the yellow field grass.
When he lifted his head looking uphill to the bedding area where a doe now emerged, I stepped lightly. Step. Step. Step, then lowered myself.
His antlers were wide. They rose from his skull and followed the same plane in a different direction.
I lifted my binoculars. Wide, I said.
I couldn’t count tines. They were lost in the grass and light that disappeared leaving a digital crunch of poor resolution.
I looked through my scope. He was way out there, I thought, screwing the aperture from 4 to 5 to 6 to 7.
I could have waited.
But what is it that decides?
Once a half mile from this spot where the buck browsed and the doe emerged, I sat at canyon’s edge at first light having walked the distance from my house, up the road, through a forest, across a glade and the upper end of the same canyon. I climbed in and out of it in black night as wait-a-minute vines, hawthorn and young firs slapped me, tripped me, and pushed me onward.
I rounded the forest edge and the canyon as it fell south and steeply toward the river. I walked under what there was of stars and night sky to that place and stopped quietly to wait.
The wind came.
It blew in cold.
The skiff of snow that I kneeled on melted.
A fog boiled up and then the day broke like the fine edge of a skinning knife just sharpened.
Three deer moved across the canyon from the alder thickets and one held back, then pushed forward to stir the others.
Buck, I said shouldering the .257 Roberts, my elbows tucking soft thighs inside my knees.
I couldn’t tell.
So far out and no real light.
The wind huffed and receded, exhaled and quietly regained itself before blowing again.
I saw no antlers, but knew instinctively like we all know. Knew enough to decide before collectively making the decision.
I waited for wind, without thinking.
I raised the muzzle like a mortar tube. Click, click.
And without saying yes, or no, calculated the puzzle and touched off the round like Sudoku.
400 yards away, the deer jumped. It’s legs scrambled as its body catapulted downhill, into a stand of aspen, clashing and crashing until the noise, as I heard it from across the canyon, stopped.
It was a 5-point buck I discovered later, hiking down and then up between the columnar basalt, its brush, yellow pine and, on the other side, the aspens that clawed steps where soil held.
Something, not me, not decidedly, had known it.
This time was like that except for one factor: The two deer. There had been two deer in many years at this spot, or generally speaking this quadrant of field had I previously shot and lost.
All these years of cross canyon gunning, of field edge plunging, of mountain hiking and pot-shotting, and killing, running bucks, bucks that stopped to look back, or broadside bad boys. Of stalking and trailing and plunking bedded deer, or deer ready for the bed. But at this spot for some reason I was 0 for 2.
I lay now on my belly and the buck turned my way. There was nothing for him to see.
I had a clump of gone-to-seed goldenrod, yarrow and buckthorn to shield me.
He lowered his head and I watched.
I could make a stalk to the next swale, I thought. Trim off 100 yards and get a better shot, maybe, if the wind doesn’t change, or the doe doesn’t bleat.
I could slip northeast and cut 50 yards from this shot, I thought, but something like Sudoku said, just take it.
It said you’ve lost two deer here already, both of them leaving a blood trail. Both of them at this hour, just before dark; one lost in the falling snow, the other, in no snow at all.
Just take the shot.
It said two swales between you and the buck. It said 300 yards, easy.
It said .257 Roberts. Your favorite. Ned Roberts. Bear gun, elk gun, antelope gun.
It said whitetail gun and I jumped a little as the recoil snapped and my vision, through the scope saw sky for a moment, and the buck bounded north to the woods.
Chi-chink, the action said.
The smoking brass flipped back toward my shoulder.
Ruger, Model 77.
I revisualized.
A hit, I said.
At the shot, the buck had jumped back then turned toward the woods, and the trails there, the down barbed wire fence. It disappeared in the swale of yellow grass and then reappeared, it’s tail up, bounding before the forest absorbed it.
I waited.
Night coming.
I waited then rose and walked into the field counting paces to where I thought the buck had been before I slammed it with a 117 grain.
One, two, three, I said. Twenty-four, twenty-five … One-hundred and fifty two, one hundred and fifty-three … two hundred sixty eight, two hundred sixty-nine.
It was 278 steps and I saw no blood in the thigh-deep grass. I looked more closely.
Is this the spot? I asked.
He is in there. In the woods. Forty yards inside the forest of tamarack and fir. That's where he folded. That's where the shot, its impact, the fatal and throbbing wound sent him face down and his legs still kicking before he died.
I told myself.
I waited under a sky of unfurled curtain. Before it closed went to look.
The forest was dark. I zigzagged. I crouched futilely for dirt, hoofed, for the hulk of a buck body deadened in the dark.
There was none.
…
Nights are long this time of year. What was left unresolved at 5 p.m. that last afternoon will find closure today.
It was early next morning.
I made coffee at four and took inventory.
I was out the door long before first light. It was an hour walk to the rattling spot and my buck, I said.
I brought my rifle, gutting knife and patience.
I would use the most intrinsic of senses, rely on them, let centuries pass if need be like minutes as I sniffed the trail, spotting blood, crawling, keeping at it.
It was tracking time in the big woods and 0-3 wasn’t an option.

—Ralph Bartholdt

Neon October night

2011-11-16T20:29:00.001-08:00

Tram downtown Munich heading to the Leonrod Platz/Ralph Bartholdt

We walked from the Theresienwiese, the site of the interminable and eternal Oktoberfest, where once was held the royal wedding reception for King Ludwig and his queen Theresa, the first royal bash at what was then the city's gates, 150 years ago.
The royal gala is still revered by modern revel-goers for two weeks each October, with millions of gallons of beer and gaudy.
We celebrated the wedding belatedly.
Then left the drooping beer tents, sad and empty at this hour, behind us. Walked to the Poccistrasse past The Crash, a derelict dive bar we frequented with some frequency.
It was late.
We didn't talk of the Pinakothek, the first museum, its counterpart or the art therein complements of the late-late King Ludwig, nor did we discuss topics we had slept through, beery and blistered from too many nights at this festival while studying - putatively - at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet, the city's main liberal arts school, which the married king had named after himself and his son.
We didn't discuss any of this because we knew little of it.
Having grown here, it should have been otherwise.
Munich. Autumn.
This was years ago and who can recount them anyways?
The leaves on the street were matted with rain that we had avoided by standing at the edges of the Augustiner tent downing our 12th liter.
It had been an all day gathering of friends and acquaintances, of newly hatched alliances and the warmth of fall sun on the long tables, splattering and drowning in the golden beer its effervescence.
Now we were walking home in the rain. Street lights blinked vacantly. There was no traffic.
The trams had stopped.
The buses sheltered.
The U-bahn had long ago pulled into the station at Holzapfelkreut. End of the line. Its passengers beery and asleep. To snooze, itself, until the red eye run at 5 a.m.
We crossed the Lindwurmstrasse, its basswoods giant and ready to rain leaves like plates onto the pavement shining neon with no service signs, the aroma of mint and oregano from the Turkish restaurants, their Yemek - the dolmas and sarmas, lamb, tomatoes and peppers.
Closed now.
Rain on windows. Cigarette butts snuffed and ground into the floors of foyers.
Somewhere near Sendling, or Untersendling we parted the rope stanchions of a closed cafe and disassembled the stacked tables and chairs on the wet sidewalk and sat. The rain had stopped.
Someone had a pouch of Drum and papers. We rolled and smoked, our cigarettes blinking, the orange star inhallations, the deadening gray preponderance, a car's headlights shot through the silvery gutters painted with the scales of fish it seemed, so shining and reflective.
What do you make of this, we asked.
My parents had met not far from here, not far by bus, north of Laim at the Nymphenburger Platz and even as a teenager my mother had pressed to take me there as she had many times much earlier, and we walked the palace gardens, the crushed rock paths, circled the lake and stood on a bridge with the long eels sliding through the canals below us, back and forth, like terrible punctuation marks, finned with eyes like birds.
My grandmother and aunt are buried in the cemetery south of where we sat that night. My uncle too, the old Messerschmidt ace of World War II.
Other relatives, memories of them just flagstone now, the kind of stuff that wobbles underfoot, are there as well, 2 meters under the turf that had stood horses and soldiers, refugees and immigrants so long its calcite is a dictaphone of the otherworld.
Name the names, just do it, and they evoke a memory like sulfur burning, if just for an unrecognized instant. The lingering smell is unmistakable.
It is memory and history.
It is the family stories we vowed to remember for their import, gone now.
Genes and likenesses buried deep in the river loam of the Isar and Danube, what's left of the glacial wash sending Black Forest dirt to the Black Sea.
My aunt told me the last time I saw her as we sat at a clothed table in her Munich garden how she saw her relatives dead in a muddy ditch, their horses too, their wagon overturned. As a girl refugee from Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg then) she left her homeland as the smoke of burning buildings spiraled skyward, as nation treasures were sacked and looted and the Russian Army a mortar shot behind this throng of escaping people, gaining ground, getting closer, its Njet! and Uri, Uri.
She kept walking, her blue eyes like the wings of Lazuli buntings straight on toward the West and away from this war.
She poured me cognac. She cut roses for a vase.
I couldn't stop to mourn, she said. And didn't.
Die Blaue Taube. Another tavern. Closed at that hour, so late in the night, so early the next day that the monks at Andechs had stopped praying, just for a few hours at the cusp of morning and night, their incantations still echoed in the abbey like a pot left on. Their prayers slipped on silent feet into the foggy alpine meadows where wild pigs rooted, tunneling with their snouts and quietly snorting.
Down in this valley, in Ludwig's town, we kept on walking.
The sky turned slowly from black habit to the tungsten blue of Wuppertal steel.
Munich's streets were sad and happy, newly washed.
Someone pulled a dram of schnapps from a coat pocket and toasted.
A bird piped.
We walked on:
Harras. Furstenrieder.

—Ralph Bartholdt

Two-handed fishermen and the river

2011-11-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

Mike "Poppy" Cummins at his Red Shed spey shop along the Clearwater River's Peck cutoff/Ralph Bartholdt

I was a kid living in a small room in a faux log house on a lake in northern Minnesota where at night I dug through a box of old outdoor magazines that the local preacher gave me from his garage as mayflies, caddis and stones fluttered against the screen window and little brown bats bumped and crawled there chasing a meal.

The Coleman lanterns hissed in the living room and the sallow light of the sooty oil lamps with the elegant glass chimneys cast long shadows as outside the last of the walleye fishermen bobbed on black water in the narrows before reeling their lines and twisting the throttle on their outboards as they headed home.

It was there, in that room of that faux log house with what seemed a never ending push of waves against the rocky shore, that I discovered a river out west, way over the divide of The Rockies, weeks away on foot, maybe months, or even farther into the Bitterroots and west yet.

I read about it in a magazine.

It was called the Clearwater River and the magazine ran a double page watercolor of a man, solo and waist deep in a lonely river with autumn colors surrounding and a sky like a sooty boiling pot overhead.

He was fishing for steelhead, and he was alone on a river that rivaled any other out there. It was relatively undiscovered, this river, except by locals and the determined few, such as the author who for some reason reminds me to this day - although the magazine, the article, and the illustration have long melted into the long gone - of Russell Chatham the Western painter, writer and fisher.

This week I went to recapture the image if nothing else.

It had been more than 30 years since I read the article. Since I dug in the box of silverfish garage magazines as I did every night those summers as a kid by kerosene lamp, as a means to nudge dreams maybe, to spur imaginings of a vague future, or to complement my own fishing experience.

This week, I drove south on Highway 95 from Idaho's Panhandle, hung a left through Potlatch, a town so steeped in its own namesake, history and ties to the shuttered timber industry that it may never recover from this long belch of down and out.

I turned again south through Deary, another relic looking for a way out of stump heaven, and Kendrick and before Juliaetta head up a steep grade that would take me over a hump of wheat fields and back south to the river that has for decades to locals been a stream of contentment, no matter how hard the times.

I had driven this route before long ago and for a time, remembered the article even then, as a younger man, but it wasn't until now that the whole ring of gear, of leader and bobber and weights, of flies and streamer and the bunghole heft of weight-forward line wrapped around my subconscious like a bola.

It hobbled me and knocked me down.

I drove past Lenore on the river road, its old bridge, the old remnant of agriculture and rail so far gone into the black and white yearbooks of striped, knee-length sock wearing basketball stars with freckles on their backs that it sniffs of warehouse dust, and I kept going.

At the Peck turnoff I veered right.

And then again, hard this time, and I parked in a mud and grass yard between two drift boats.

A dog barked.

I walked up the steps and into the small, barnlike building. It was cool. A heater hummed. Lights were low. The walls rung with fly gear.

No one there.

I walked out and squinted into the late autumn sun.

The dog, a mix of many varieties most notably the rural neighborhood genome, still barked. It was a steady, even bark that said hello, nice to see you, hold on because Poppy is on his way.

That kind of bark, and then I saw a man with a beard like a gnome in sweatpants and baseball cap picking his way around potholes as he walked down the driveway from a nearby house.

Hi, I said.

How are you? Poppy said.

Poppy, known probably to his family and first acquaintances in another life as Mike Cummins, his given name, is not a large man, but he isn't small either. Years have given him the girth of a salmon spent seasons at sea, or the bright steelhead, sea run too and ready to pound water if hooked.

Poppy is that kind of big and his beard covers almost a quarter of him and like the fish that he covets, the ones that run down this, his river, the Clearwater, to sea and learn there, and eat and evade and fight and live before coming back, he has made his own sea runs.

He was a construction contractor for most of his life, and a truck company owner - he hauled logs out of Orofino, a small town upriver until he called it quits.

Unlike many or most or just a helluva lot of men, Poppy followed that divining rod in his gut when he converted a small hay barn, horse and tack shed into a shop that specialized in something special.

He started a fly shop dedicated to two-handed, or spey, fly rods before the sport of North American spey rodding had really taken off.

He did it because he loved the rods, the river and steelhead.

"Our focus here is pretty narrow," Poppy says. "It's all two-handed rods."

This happened from necessity. Arthritis, the kind of bone ache you try to avoid, prompted the former traditional fly fisher to look for a way to throw gear with two hands.

"I was trying to spread the pain around," he says.

He researched and found a method of lake fishing in the British Isles that used "Loch" rods. These were large, two handed varieties that could zing gear, but they were made for standing water.

More research brought him to spey: Two handed rods as long as 16 feet that can cast far, and mend all that line for a good presentation.

He couldn't afford to buy one then, so he built his own out of spare Fenwick parts and some graphite tubing.

He calls it the junkyard spey and it still hangs in his Red Shed fly shop on the Peck cutoff road to remind him of the days when he didn't have the cash to buy what now he is selling.

Most of his neighbors don't either, so he sells packages in the $450 range and the rods come with lifetime warranties.

"I don't sell any that aren't guaranteed for life," Poppy says. "I know most people are working people and they can't drop $1,000 for a two-handed rod."

Although this part of the world, as even the blue-ribbon cutthroat trout fishery Kelly Creek to the east, is spin country, Poppy doesn't stand out too much.

This chunk of Idaho is the slam and drag reel world of swivels and snap hooks, lead sinkers, diesel and chrome, dual, semi pipes on pickups. It's a chunk of trot line heaven if not for the game wardens that troll the river too.

In this world Poppy is less an anomaly than his clients. They come from California, the coast and Colorado. They come from the Battenkill and the Beaverhead in cars with out of state plates because they too, probably and maybe long ago read the article that I read, or the many since that were like it and they remember too from pictures the autumn colors on this river that is still, even now, relatively undiscovered and underutilized.

And that's OK. They throw spey. They stop at the Red Shed. Poppy may give them a hat to advertise his business.

He may give them advice. He will tell them flat out and without reservation how to paint the ceiling with a spey rod and then let them at it.

Poppy is the river, like that. He pulls no punches. He doesn't push.

And besides, they came here for the same reason as I.

And as Poppy, too, I'm pretty sure.

-Ralph Bartholdt

Another version, one more astute and tuned to specifics, a version that more deeply plies spey, the Clearwater fishery, and Poppy will appear in the December issue of Northwest Sportsman Magazine

Birches

2011-11-05T11:31:00.001-07:00

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. — Robert Frost

—Ralph Bartholdt

Petrov's defense

2011-10-13T15:52:00.001-07:00

Morning chess match before the five-minute first grade bell/Bartholdt

We have this thing going, he and I.
He waits for me all scrubbed and hair wet in his shirt or sweater with the logo embroidered above the chest pocket like a little man ready to take the bus to boarding school.
But it’s North Idaho, and his school is just down the road and his mom goes to work early.
So, he waits for me to do my morning work at home, a bit of research, maybe write a letter or two while he pokes at his hot cereal in the kitchen upstairs listening to the cartoons quietly hubbub on the television.
When he cannot stand it longer he thumps down the steps to ask, when are we going to play?
I showed him his first chess set at 4 and he was taken by the armor-clad knights astride horses in courbette, elephants with towers on their back reminiscent of Hannibal, swishing bishops, gallant queens and the plodding pawns like dour legions set to make a mark or die uneventfully.
He is 6. It is 8:04 a.m. Rain paints the concrete a new gray. Leaves joust with an autumn wind, some falling blood red to the glistening grass. His school starts at 9, plenty of time for a game or two.
I am white, he says, scrambling up the stairs to the board he has laid out on the kitchen table with the white and dark pieces facing each other across the checkered battlefield.
White is allowed the first move, which gives him an edge, he figures.
His is a cracker jack board that folds into four pieces, made of glue and paper. It came from the dime store in a tinny box with a checker set and tic-tac-toe, but he never uses those.
Let’s play chest! He announces often after rolling from bed, showering, dressing and staring at his breakfast.
I go first!
Lately I have won easily like foul hooking a fish.
Oops, you’re in check mate.
It shows my lack of education at this game. I too learned as a small boy and I taught my daughters to play, but they have other things now on their minds.
Teaching children to play chess is as good as I do.
By 8, they have me on my heels and sometimes painted into a corner, which is to say I know little about the game having learned it young and never caught its intricacies like some do.
I had an instructional paperback once that I found on the bookshelf at home where I grew up and read it when I was 11, but the opening chess moves it taught, aside from a few, have long since dripped into the swarm of past like rain in the rock garden.
I remember names only vaguely, they stem from places I found interesting then, Catalan System, the Sicilian Defense – something I equated to a stiletto or a small revolver, and the dreaded Kings Indian Defense which must have something to do with Gurkhas, I surmised and still do for lack of any proper instruction or interest.
Petrov’s dance – likely a Russian defensive move to an offense I may blunder into – remains too, although I only remember the name and equated it with ballet because Baryshnikov had entered the American scene at the time.
Long ago.
That was in northern Minnesota and he had sequestered one of The North Woods' favorite daughters in Jessica Lange.
On these mornings, my boy lashes out decisively taking pawn after pawn with a wide grin and a shy flitting of his eyes as if he is a pine marten ready to pounce on a bird.
Aw, he says. I didn’t think you would see that!
Sometimes usually with a few minutes to spare for the drive to school, and weedling between traffic in the lot for a parking spot, and walking him to the door, I slip the noose and say check mate and he sees it too.
Why do I never win? He asks.
You will, I tell him. And know there is more to this game than that.
I won a lot as a kid, and got drubbed when I moved to the rainy cafes of Southeast Alaska where men sat all day drinking coffee, smoking, waiting for the weather to work, with their nose pointed at a chess game.
There’s more to it, I could point out didactically, but he wouldn’t get it.
Not yet.
He won’t know until time allows him some backward glances.
And that will be soon enough.
Check mate, buddy.We have to go.

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

Coming About

2011-09-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Canoe, boy and dog, Lake Coeur d'Alene/Bartholdt

We slipped out in the morning.
Joggers along the trail behind the college where the Spokane River begins its descent to the Columbia nodded approval at the idea of a launch.
How far? One asked.
The length of it, I said, meaning Coeur d’Alene Lake, although I doubted this man, boy and dog, pushing a river canoe, were destined to go much farther than Mica Bay, at least on this day.
Good Luck, said a lady with a great house bred Golden Retriever, the kind made for treeing the occasional squirrel or spayed cat when playful instinct meets archaic gene pool. The result is pure romp.
Thanks, I said, and we slid the camouflaged 17-footer into the great flat of water with morning sun dancing in crystal-like effervescence on its surface. Gulls and Canada geese puttered along the shore and from a distance a motorboat too made its way, wakeless, up the river toward the lake and greater Cougar Bay.
The day started with promise.
No wind yet. What was forecasted would blow south and west, a combination that would help push the narrow bathtub like vessel – with aid of our paddling – toward our destination somewhere away from our starting point.
The take-out point depended on the patience of a 6-year-old, the allegiance of a normally overactive Vizsla pointer, and my own endurance.
We had packed a cooler of bananas, water jugs, a pack of soybeans still in shell, and oranges.
A waterproof bag held cameras and equipment. Jackets and hats in case the weather in late afternoon pulled a fast one. We had flotation devices required by the Marine Patrol, cell phone, extra paddles and the kind of exuberance required for a potentially tough trip.
Our paddling took us first past the dolphins in Cougar Bay where once rafts of logs meant for the mills along Blackwell Island were held fast by swifters and boom chain like a delirium of never ending fuel for an economy that was balls to the walls or bust.
That was 30 years past and more, back into the dusk of last century. The greater lake was referred to then, not unjustly, as a mill pond for the sawmills, big and small, that dotted the shoreline and grew in size and intent the closer one got to a bustling and smoke belching Coeur d’Alene.
What the once tug boat churning, log-brail pushing and steel whining Cougar Bay is now can best be compared to an electric trolling motor. There is little wake and no sound here but for water birds occasionally stirring from their scat speckled moorings. Boom sticks are tied fast as if for another heyday. They serve as breakwaters. Their destiny may be as hull-scoring deadheads or beach furniture for a haute culture if it comes. Or just more of the same: Relics and a bird sanctuary.
We stopped at Kidd Island where it is said a man built a foundation for a home before realizing that his title was clouded as the autumn mist that rolls from the bay. Ownership was inconclusive.
The foundation of his dreamhouse is still there. A place for a boy to dream now of pirates, if only for a while.
A boiler from a steamboat lies on the rocks just off the small island’s – officially the only island in the lake – northern shore.
Smallmouth bass fishers, especially youngsters with a kicker and punt who are prohibited by their parents from traveling bigger waters, ambush the bronzebacks here that fin the shallows in the evening hunting prey.
Pushing past three-mile point at the time of day when motorboats have wakened and found an obscure pleasure in gunning up and down the lake, the flat water we had enjoyed until then became a series of swells and the boy and dog asked for land to set foot on again, so we did.
An empty beach showed itself and we pulled ashore. Trespassers as we were according to the signs – and with our apologies – we stayed just long enough to toss sticks, eat a banana and some soy beans and drink water from the jugs before pushing off with a sound tailwind toward Swede Point.
We stopped twice more. The shoreline here being less acquainted with canoes than the gentle rocking of motorboat wake that can be akin to a public swimming pool in summer with waves romping from several directions at once.
We watched a sailboat captain struggle with a colorful spinnaker before the wind found it, and he and his craft cut a coarse past Driftwood Bay and farther south into the sun’s veil before slipping out of sight.
After 6 hours of listening to the dipping of paddles, being dribbled on with drops from the paddle's coming about, and the slosh of waves against the hull the Vizsla opted to curl up by the cooler and go to sleep.
As did the boy, who had bravely and for several hours helped push the canoe along.
“We are moving so slow,” he said. “When are we going to fish?”

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum Photography is canoeing the length o the lake and back for a writing project he hopes to complete soon

Kelly Creek, okay

2011-09-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

Cool morning, end of summer at Kelly Creek, Idaho/Bartholdt

The man in Idaho said the road is long and rutted. Be careful around the curves.
It’s a 2-hour drive from the bottom of the pass in Montana back into Idaho on the other side, he said. Bring beer.
The man at the gas station in Superior, Montana said motorists bomb down that road pulling trailers, campers and ATVs so keep your eyes peeled and know where the shoulder ends.
He recommended taking the road to the Kelly Creek Forest Service work camp once we reached the intersection on the other side of Hoodoo Pass in Idaho.
There are people there, at the Forest Service camp, he said. The rest of it is plenty remote. Most anglers fish the upper part of Kelly Creek. The water only gets better the farther up you go.
I use a renegade, he said. Small, this time of year.
He reached inside the cab of his pickup and took an aluminum fly box as big as a pack of smokes from the ashtray, opened it and showed neat rows of little flies in drab colors like museum pieces sans formalin.
I see, I said.
When he left, crossing the underpass into town and toward the Clark Fork, I noticed the stickers of bears and bass and whitetail deer on the small camper that rode in the bed of his truck.
They looked like the faded emblems of Schmidt beer cans.
We fueled up and headed east from the gas station on the trunk highway past the mill and its mounds of wood chips, large piles by the hundreds in the former mill yard where stacks of logs, sprayed by water pumped from the Clark Fork River that flows nearby once towered as high as the tallest building in this western Montana town. The piles of wood chips are what remains of a timber industry in these Bitterroot Mountains that doubled incomes, economies and coffers before it doubled up. Before politics and the need to recreate outlasted the need to grow revenues, tax bases, curbs and parks.
What’s left of it are wood chips excavated now into long bed dump trucks.
The Superior, Montana mill blew its last sad whistle years before with families gone, and the remnants of this industry, its chips, decades deep, rotted slowly. The wood acid seeped slowly into the big river, flowing elsewhere, taking dollars with it.
Until the price of hog fuel jumped. Now the chips are sent for miles and there is a sort of industry again, as ephemeral, and on a smaller scale.
The washboard road to Hoodoo Pass tests undercarriages and suspension. It tests the will to plod on and not turn and head back downhill the way you came to seek out other destinations, maybe. Those less prone to pop a nut and leave you stranded.
On the Idaho side of the pass, the 250 Road is paved for many miles until the intersection.
One way leads to the upper end of Kelly Creek and the Moose Creek bridge. The other follows the North Fork of the Clearwater River to the work camp where Kelly Creek joins the river and a tent spot costs $7. Here you can build a driftwood fire in the metal grills and lay out your gear on a picnic table, take note, or pause, or just reconsider what was left behind.
You’re here now, in renegade heaven.
You can try the other road on your way out.
One Labor Day weekend, Kelly Creek campground was moderately full, or empty depending how you tip the glass.
We started fishing right away, enjoying a lower river devoid of long rod interlopers. Most of them gunned their vehicles south on the dirt road that follows the creek from the point where it meets the North Fork, having received it seemed, the same review: Fishing is better up higher.
We found the creek about the same, no matter where we went.
There were double hook ups, single larger fish and the usual bright and lean cutthroat, their slightly spotted forward end sprinkled heavier the farther south toward the tail, their cut slit throat and fighting throbs into the current.
We found the renegade worked, as did the parachute Adams, the purple haze, Griffith’s gnat and several hopper imitations.
When the fishing slowed, big green streamers with their fannies wagging pulled in fish.
What we found, in large is that this blue ribbon water, despite shouldering a gravel road for 10-miles, was extremely fishable.
Not epic. No catastrophically astound.
It was a solid cutthroat fishery, and if you wanted more, you would park and hike, “as far as my little legs will take me,” a fishing guide told me.
He often walked several miles up the trail that follows Kelly Creek long after the road has found another compass course and bid the moving water sayonara with a wave of dust and gravel knocked from the bridge rails where the road rises toward Cayuse and Toboggan Hill.
Fantastic, he said of that hiking stretch and it may be so.
We tried it and almost got caught in the after dark.
Slowly pushing downstream, casting into that glimmer glass of last light, raising the rod tip to a sound or a slight tug but not by sight.
I like the trees at Kelly Creek. The long spires, their gnarled and veined miasma, as if a gale could topple them but in these mountains, when the wind blows it pushes snow and even if they fell then, not a soul would hear it.
I like the mountains too, the Moose Creek buttes, miles of wild where a bear grunt, as ursus americanus tangles with a colony of bugs in a fallen log, falls deaf on ears intent on bird song, or the insect buzz along the water.
The granite cupolas and spring strung meadows are gaudy jewelry on a landscape that has little time to be admired before the winter shutters roads and trails.
So it puts on a show, like the old woman in the Faulkner tale.
It spruces up for a day on the town, or guests, but it's made more for the snow and cold and inaccessible when wolves walk ridges of drifted snow and moose settle in the aspen groves, the dogwood hillsides where the wind blows free, and mow the blue stem like buffalo.
We stayed two days and fished most of that time, but when the driftwood flames died down and the morning coffee was rumbling in our guts we followed the 255 back to Montana, hit the Interstate at Superior and veered from it at St. Regis where Brooks at the Clark Fork Trout and Tackle said how do.
The St. Joe is fantastic.
He was talking about another river on the Idaho side that we sometimes refer as home.
So, we went there on our last vacation day and caught all the cutts we wanted. Bigger fish than those on Kelly.
With a lot more room to play.

-Ralph Bartholdt (Skookum Photography)

Ball bustin' for Pend Oreille bronzebacks

2011-09-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

Calvin Fuller and Sam Wike heading to bass country on Pend Oreille/Bartholdt

We’re on the water, but barely. We are over the water, hovering, but not even that.
The engine is hollering.
The flesh on our faces is contorted. We are looking ahead into a wind wrought by our progress.
We are flat-ass flying.
The 17-give-or-take-a-foot skiff we are in, the three of us, is mostly out of the water. Occasionally the fiberglass hull skips and skims the surface of Lake Pend Oreille while the boat’s tail, and its stern and transom, bump the aqua velva blue as the big engine shoots spray behind us like a fat-cheeked kid making like a soda fountain.
“This thing does pretty good,” the guy at the console, my unpaid and unrequited guide for the day shouts into the wind and I can almost see the bubble that carries his voice form and then catch wind and swish away behind him and out over the motor and the lake like a vocal rooster tail, like a Chinese poem partly scribbled, like a paper flag torn away in a gale, or this summer morning in general.
We are heading to Bottle Bay Resort because the gas gauge says empty and we know we need more fuel than what’s in reserve to fish the many places that bass frequent on this massive gouge of a lake that sports more than 100 miles of shoreline and dives to more than 1,000 feet in places.
It isn’t 8 a.m. yet.
Many habitants of the lake haven’t had their first cup of coffee.
They have not yet sniffered the lake air, heard the spiraling laugh of the osprey or watched bumblebees dance on the rusty lilies at their front steps dappled in morning sun.
We have been at this since daybreak.
Casting over sand bars, throwing streamers into the maw of creeks, drifting, idling the electric motor into weedy bays, slamming fur and feathers into the pond water and watching bass wheel out of the murk, bronze backed, mouths agape, to bend fly rods, or leave only a bulge in the water like an air bubble subsurface boiling.
Calvin Fuller is at the wheel. He is not a guide, does not claim to be and is not paid to be. He is not paid.
Fuller is however a former sporting goods store owner, who now operates a fly fishing shop for Big R – Yes, the farm and ranch supply store – but with a twist.
The twist, in part, is this.
It is us freewheeling across the big lake, it is the fly rods and fly gear poking toward the bow on the front casting platform, it is the fuzzy bunny tail, barbell eye, and sometimes double hooked streamers that lie randomly around the boat teasing the wind until it deftly catches one of the lures and tosses it overboard as Calvin, or Sam Wike, the marketing guy at Big R, flail a hand in an attempt to catch the overboard lure as the boat keeps rocketing toward the gas pumps at Bottle Bay.
The flies stuck into the outdoor carpeting of the seats are not #18 PMDs, paraduns or sparsely hackled renegades meant to be supped by truculent trout.
These resemble lures.
The hooks are #4.
The difference is akin to a pancake spare and the 6-foot tire of a Terex dump truck.
Yet, the lures, white, black and green, fuzzy, furry or feathery, one at a time lift from the boat into the air and sail over the water, past outstretched hands, like hand tools gone Mardis gras.
Fuller Grins.
Wike smiles as if to shrug,
There is more where they came from.
The twist is that neither Calvin, nor Sam, nor me for that matter are here on a barbed-wire testing mission. We are not field-testing Concho ranch boots, or the latest Carhartt fleece collared work coat.
We are not even field testing fly gear for that matter, except, it must be said, Wike has brought along a bunch of streamers that a guy in the Great Falls, Montana Big R shop uses to catch brown trout on the Missouri, and Wike’s savvy and fly fishing charisma have been pricked. Interest has been piqued. Wike has asked himself the inevitable question: Will these things catch bass?
So he hands them around, and we throw them at banks, lily pad fields and rip rap.
The twist I mentioned earlier lies in a contradiction that I have not yet assailed:
Farm and ranch stores seem to engender a certain tropism.
They almost drip the notion that fishing entails worms and cane poles in a Texas tank. Or, at the cutting edge, an ugly old spin rod plunking a hula popper plug as the poor-whills ponder posterity and night, like a C note, vibrates through the thorn brush.
This Big R ain’t that.
This is sort of a North Idaho Big R with a sporting goods section crowding rows of pig feed, and burly trophy elk mounts bugling over the herbicide aisle.
The fly shop here rivals many I've seen in towns known for their micro brews (Sandpoint has its own versions of those) and glossy photos in Outside magazine.
When we slide into Bottle Bay under the gaze of waterfront mansions a man in light shorts and Tevas tells us the place has no fuel.
Let us not dismay.
The fuel gauge is buzzing now like a gull with a craw full of oversize herring.
Fuller keeps the grin and the boat is gunned north and west this time toward Sandpoint’s docks.
We make it there, fuel up, then fish into town. The electric motor's battery is almost gone, and the big 115 hp is asking for oil. We slip quietly through shadows of the highway and railroad bridges that carry commerce to this North Idaho town until we get to the dock a half block from Main Street.
We reel in under a willow whose leaves lick the water.
Stepping onto the dock, we shake off the morning.
Then head to MickDuff’s Brewing Company for a soup, sandwich and maybe a beer.
There's more fishing to be done.
For now, it must wait.

Ralph Bartholdt wrote about fly fishing on lake Pend Oreille in the September issue of Northwest Sportsman Magazine

Backroad brookies

2011-07-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

Backroad brookie in Idaho's Panhandle/Ralph Bartholdt

I’m not sure how we got there.
We were heading toward the woods on a road named after upland game and a local stream, idling by the orchards and the long stretches of emptiness with the Cabinet Mountains dressed frilly and white like a debutante hand-walking with her nose in the grass while the hay bines down here at ground level made bales.
It was early July and the first cutting of timothy, vetch and alfalfa in these dry land fields was in full swing. The hay was swathed in rows by tractors with umbrellas against the sun and farmers with faces like waxed paper covering bowls of wet melon.
We trundled to a stop at a sign on a road that couldn’t decide between pavement and dirt, with both options potholed or cracked, and he said that way.
The road led past a store with a beer sign, motorcycles and a man on the porch wearing a Panama hat.
We went inside and the boy said worms.
What about worms? He said. What about fishing?
He emphasized the first syllable with pursed lips. He was thinking.
I had promised that, hadn’t I?
I was heading for the cooler prodded by the thought of a tall IPA when he mentioned something I had misplaced a while back. He said remember what you said about brook trout?
I had, it’s true. I had conjured Pat McManus, as well as an old friend who grew up here, and his brother – both dead – who drove these back roads long ago with a beat up luxury sedan, its tail lights taped with red paper and an exhaust left on a tool bench in the garage.
These were men who knew the brook trout haunts of this region better than baseball scores or whose left hook knocked off whose title. A barber in Sandpoint reminded me with one sentence. Boy, we used to catch the heck out of the brookies out there, he said.
I relayed this story to my 5-year-old son, a boy who furrows his brow at trout talk. Who would rather catch trout than sunfish, or crappies or bass. A young man who will stand on a rock and wave a long rod for hours for a chance to catch a cutthroat and then, if he doesn’t, pine about what he did wrong.
To him, trout are prettier than the speckled sunfish with their spines and the inky gill spot fresh from the weedy beds at the upper reaches of North Idaho’s pothole ponds. He knows their slick eel-like skin that is dotted with halos of blue and red, their gill slits like fire and the deep runs they make with a push of their tails into moving water that is bubbled with the rush of a world tilted on edge. He knows the streams skirting trees in a shade of devil’s club where he asks, as we skulk through deep needles and the smell of small lilies and trillium, “Are there bears?”
Trout hold the fascination of fairies and witch hazel. They are the infinite wonder of a world under water where wolves drink moonlight and elk cross at night.
I stopped at the cooler in the place with the motorcycles out front and said, yes.
I bought an IPA anyways, along with a cup of Joe, a pop for the boy and a Styrofoam container of worms with the name Werner’s Wigglers embossed in blue and we drove east, I think, up the valley toward the bony riddle of mountains that dribbled with snow melt and the promise of streams full of trout.
North Idaho wasn’t always called that. It was the Panhandle way back. At least one newspaper up here considers the moniker a nod to what is wrong with the place and uses “northern Idaho,” instead, although newcomers go blank at the distinction.
North Idaho, to old timers mostly, is a hat tip to the guy who bought the empire of small daily newspapers up here and renamed the place. He starved out the weekly news outlets, too, then gobbled them up, we're told, from the northern border to the Silver Valley and Montana using means, they say, that would make Ray Kroc look kind.
He used them to advertise his stake here, and people came.
The place was summarily turned into investment property, a golf tour, big belt homes for the summer rich, and service industry jobs whose wages support trailer towns, but precious else.
The rest of us cling to the place like velcro doing what we can to pay mortgages, power bills and fill up the tanks of our 4-can pickups. And to buy handmade beer, if beer is an option.
His newspapers, some contend, would do well to drop their reference to current events, but are models of marketing.
On this bridge, though, on this day under this certain hot sun, we cast into splash pools with worms and no thought to much else.
Not even our proclivity for dry flies, a predisposition that in another place or time would have us rummaging the trunk for small boxes of dun imitations and fine tippet.
Today, I’m not sure why, or if any thought at all was given to the task at hand, we let a small sinker pull the worms down into the swirling holes and we retrieved trout: Small brookies mostly, depending on terrain and distance from big water. Some pools held cutthroats, small precious drops of silk and gems, which we released quickly to watch them skirt as if motorized deep and soundlessly into black current.
We drove on, stopping often, not letting the ubiquitous No Trespassing signs, the snake with its fanciful whisper, the fangs and delight that filled driveway signs, or gun noises, dissuade us. We caught so many trout we lost track of numbers and time, until finally we were so far from our original destination that we gave in to circumstance and conjecture, letting neither color the day.
On one particular stream, as we stood on the road a man on a bicycle asked if we were allowed to cast here.
Why yes, we said.
He pondered as we pulled brook trout from the white water below us.
“Is that the biggest fish?” My son asked often, as we tossed the small ones back and ripped the gills from a couple of brookies that had swallowed the hook.
After having fished so many years – 2 – in his young life and always tossing fish back, he was elated to be allowed to keep a limit of brook trout, a gregarious fish that the state game department encourages anglers to catch and line their creel.
“Are you sure?” Said the man on the bike who belonged to a high caliber home not visible through the trees that was reached by a paved drive and a gate, and whose property the stream we fished crossed, so he felt a kinship to the water and the beasts therein of which he knew little.
“I don’t think anyone has ever caught fish here,” said.
He was wrong of course. The sons of the farmer from whom he purchased the land a few years ago fished here often and filled pans with these trout decades ago, and even just a few years past, before construction began on the house at the end of the paved drive, the county deputy stopped summer evenings before he got off work to bring a few brookies home to the kids. Long ago, it’s been years now, the brothers with the luxury car, sans struts and exhaust, the rear lights covered with red paper, had a name for this spot. July afternoons when the road was less traveled, they shared a six pack of local beer and tales would unwind as they pulled in each fish.
We got home late that night. He was asleep and dreamed of fishing the shadowy current when I laid him in bed. His dreams were of rings in the water, small trout pulled gemlike from pools.
I dreamed of it too. I was awake. I didn’t have a fly rod in my hand and didn't miss the quake of the wrist as the line snaps back and sails on.
I usually do.
It was small hooks and worms I dreamed of, spin casts to moving water you could jump across. Fennel and angelica under big trees.
It was brook trout in northern Idaho, dusty roads, worm cans and miles of ferreting streams in a Panhandle that is there still, as it was and has been.
I found the utopia of a trout fishery, albeit neglected, after so many years of looking.
Without even a plan.

-Ralph Bartholdt

Lindsey and his North Idaho lakers

2011-06-24T05:52:00.000-07:00

Priest Lake guide Rich Lindsey with a ubiquitous laker/Ralph Bartholdt

Rich Lindsey keeps a wire cutter in a pole holder in the back of his boat.
It's a pocket size cutter used to dislodge fouled fish hooks and snip tangled leaders.
Mostly, it's used to kill fish.
This is done with swift dexterity and a mantra.
The mackinaw - invariably the fish his clients hook are V-tailed lake trout - is held with one hand by its gill slits as clients admire its lines, size and verticulation. The other hand, the one grasping the implement makes one or two swift movements as the dull steel knot of the wire cutter thumps the fish between the eyes.
Lindsey, one of the Idaho Panhandle's premier fishing guides, a guy who has been at it longer than anyone in this land of woods and mountains that plunge into the gem-like lakes of prehistoric glacial gouges, has his own way of doing things.
"Welcome aboard," he lilts almost quietly to the fish whose fins extend like oriental fans with each thump. They quiver as their brain pan is irreparable jostled.
The fish are dropped into a box at the transom with a cutting board top and although Idaho Fish and Game allow anglers to keep six lake trout, Lindsey's boat limit is three apiece, which allows his clients enough of the meaty mackinaws to feed a family and ensures the lake keeps on giving.
"This lake has been generous to me," Lindsey says.
And his generosity is not only in giving clients a taste of North Idaho's Valhalla, but in making sure it stays fertile, at least from a fishery perspective.
As fishery programs in many northern Idaho lakes preclude any mention of mackinaw or lake trout, Priest Lake, up here in the northern reaches - so far north that it keeps the riff raff out as some residents like to proclaim - the name of the game is simple: Lambaste lakers.
And that's what Lindsey and his clients do.
My own preponderance with lake trout began as a kid on northern Minnesota's Lake Vermilion where I grew up.
I fished for bass mostly, and walleye during the full-moon nights of July and August. Muskie could be found in the spring and northern pike were caught in the evening pulling plugs off the rock ledges where they came to hunt.
Lake trout were an anomoly.
They hung deep, between 70 and 150 feet, out there in Big Bay, paddling their V-tails in the haunting water that was often white-capped and swollen with mystery.
I caught one as a 14-year-old, by accident, while fishing for walleye using a method my Uncle Jim taught as my line dangled into the depths and the waves slapped the side of my 14-foot Crestliner.
I was alone of course, summers in the North Country of Minnesota were made for learning about everything from jointed plugs and cotter keys, portages and pint-size beers to making outboard repairs in swelling seas.
And doing it solo.
These were not seas. Not like the kind I became familiar with much later, in Southeast Alaska, but to a teenage boy the whitecaps on Big Bay were sea enough.
The fish I pulled from the depths of that lake was speckled. Its eyes were not glazed like shop-window glass: The sign of a walleye.
This fish came up slowly like a walleye does. When it got to the net, however, it had the same spike teeth but a different feel altogether.
Lake Trout, I said and pulled it in for a better look.
I kept it longer than I usually did, back then. I looked it over hard and let it go.
This was catch and release before it was cool, an impetus that later earned me a biology degree. Aside from anything feathered or furred punched with bullets or BBs, I tossed it back.
My mother assailed me for this. In hindsight, I think the piscatorial patchwork I brought home was pan worthy enough and kept me in fishing licenses.
In some respects, Mr. Lindsey follows the same philosophy.
He tells of a 50-pound mack he caught while fishing alone and the trial of shooting a picture with his cell phone camera before letting the beast free to spawn again and hopefully, be hooked by one of his clients some time in the future.
"Those 50-pounders are heavy," he says.
The memories of releasing them, though, are light.
And just like a good mackinaw lake, they remain.
Even without a photo.

Ralph Bartholdt

Another version of this story can be found in the August issue of Northwest Sportsman Magazine or at http://www.nwsportsmanmag.com/

Bass bustin' (throw 'em back)

2011-06-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

Bass angler Tony McCalmant caught his first smallmouth in a small Bonners Ferry lake/Ralph Bartholdt

It was the big rainbows that first poked Tony McCalmant with the barbed hook of youthful fishing adventure.
He spent much time as a boy trolling for world-class Gerrard rainbows with his dad on Idaho’s biggest and deepest body of water, Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho’s Panhandle, a craggy woods and mountain paradise of elk and wild cats.
His stomping grounds of Bonner’s Ferry, just a thumb hitch from Canada, doesn’t conjure immediate images of bigmouth bass. Instead, it’s cold water trout and bugling elk that spring to mind, but the small, secluded lakes around McCalmant’s hometown with names like Brushy, Smith and Robinson were also home to an abundant population of spiny rays.
McCalmant didn’t find out until he was in his teens and he hooked his first bass in one of the pint size, brush-rimmed local lakes.
“I caught my first bass when I was 14,” he says. “I caught a nine pounder out of Smith.”
Like most novice bass anglers, the experience left him with a muscle twitch in his casting arm and permanent dreams of the hard fighting, tail dancing fish he has chased ever since.
McCalmant belongs to the regional bass circuit and is a bass pro at Mark’s Marine in Coeur d’Alene not far from where he now lives in Post Falls – in the center of the state’s northern bass haunts.
When June comes, McCalmant measures water temperatures, lake depth, run off and the spawning clock. The mental math often brings him back to the place where he started fishing a couple decades ago: Lake Pend Oreille, and the wide river at its outlet that pours to the Columbia .
This time, it is not Gerrards that McCalmant is after.
“There is a good population in there of smallmouth and largemouth,” McCalmant says.
Years ago, before the bass craze struck North Idaho like a fever pitch, as most NI anglers focused on kokanee in the big lakes, or macks, or other species of trout, a few hard-core bass guys like McCalmant hit the sloughs in June for bigmouth bass, and fished the points and rocky outcrops for smallmouth.
Back then, McCalmant says, most bass guys fished in relative anonymity.
In the past decade however, things have changed.
“People saw us out there setting the hook and eventually they started checking it out,” he says.
These days the many weekend anglers come with buckets. Where the bass pros caught and released their trophies to fight them another day, the bucket brigade most often catches to keep.
“They sit at the culvert openings to the creeks and along the point banks where the bass are waiting to spawn,” McCalmant says.
From the largemouth in the warming waters of the sloughs to the smallmouth in the cooler lakes, the weekend brigade catches its limit and takes them home to the fryer.
McCalmant isn’t abject to fish eating, but he and his fellow pro anglers have seen the impacts, he says.
“The fishing is going down, and down in a hurry,” he says. “Over the past few years we have watched the population decline pretty heavy.”
He encourages all bass anglers in the Pend Oreille River sloughs to keep sustainability in mind.
“There are plenty of smaller smallmouth,” he says. “If you’re going to keep fish, keep the 12 to 15-inch fish and release the big females. Anything over 16 inches would be a good fish to put back.”
That does not mean that size worthy smallmouth bass cannot be found in the vast structural features of the lake, which sports 111 miles of shoreline.
“There are plenty 3 and 4 pound fish and bigger ones are not uncommon,” McCalmant says.
The river’s many warm, weedy sloughs hold enough bigmouths in the four to six-pound range to keep catch and release anglers coming back.
“I know of a nine pounder caught, and I’ve seen bigger fish,” he says.
Idaho regulations for its year round fishery that allows a combined six bass to be kept, with only two largemouth, and no largemouth under 16 inches, are an unwise mix, says McCalmant. The regulations make keeping the biggest, spawning fish legal.
“Those big fish are mostly hens with tens of thousands of eggs in them,” he says.
He wants people to fish bass in an effort for the sport to gain a prominent place in an angler’s repertoire of priorities, and he thinks Idaho’s reputation as a hot bass spot hasn’t yet been mined.
Buoying the Panhandle’s reputation as a ball busting bass destination can only be accomplished if anglers take care with the fishery.
“If we want to get this fishing back to where it was, in the future, we need to stop doing what we’ve been doing,” he says.
Fish it hard, but put them back, he says.

A version of this story first appeared in the June 2011 issue of Northwest Sportsman Magazine.

-Ralph Bartholdt

Missoula, maggots and this ain't rugby

2011-06-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Peggy and Joe Blackburn with samples of their stock/Ralph Bartholdt

They came to college campuses in those days, men in black suits and white shirts, grinning.
They visited the guys who worked for the US Forest Service in the summer, fighting fires. Not just Pulaski pushers, but the young men who donned the big puffy suits with the pockets up their legs and the fabric bound tightly around the ankles of their White’s smokejumper boots.
They were looking for volunteers to join a fledgling force in a sweltering place the name of which wasn’t yet terminally carved in the nation’s history. Not ours. Not yet.
Some of the boys joined up for the money and adventure. Mostly the job required bundling parcels with parachutes and kicking them off planes to people waiting in the dripping jungles below, or the parched hillsides depending on season.
They were called cargo kickers and the skills they were taught at a few Forest Service bases in the Rocky Mountain West, tying chutes to boxes and bundles to make them float safely earthward after a 1,500 foot drop, were not learned in many places at the time, not even in the Army yet.
Joe Blackburn tells the story. A young man at the University of Montana who fought fires and rode rodeo stock, then, who had earned his paratrooper wings, or would, and who fought fires by attacking them first from the sky. He and his companions jumped out of airplanes to the remote regions, canyons, forested ridges and brushy fingers of rocks. That’s where fire watchers in lookout towers using Osborne Fire Finders – great plates mounted on pedicels like archaic compass wheels – had seen smoke and directed the young men to squelch it.
Blackburn didn’t join the fleet of cargo kickers headed to Vietnam for Air America, or any other outfit, instead he became a game warden working the high plains of Montana for poachers, living in a house with his bride at Rattlesnake Canyon outside Missoula and later moving to the rugged St. Joe Forest to chase elk poachers and fish hogs who loaded their boats, pickups or creels with more than their share.
I first met Joe when he was running for sheriff. He was gray haired and gristle, smelled funky like dead things, and wood smoke, something I had, years earlier as a kid trapping in Alaska, grown accustomed to and now felt a fond reminiscence for.
He wanted to be sheriff and found an accomplice in me. The late night phone calls from challengers, the notes scribbled in a tight hand, denouncing the candidate were anonymous and follow-ups led nowhere and evidence of malfeasance was illusive, so I threw in. He was elected and what followed was a stream of inside information into the workings of small-town law enforcement: Busts, and drug deals gone bad, dead drunks with grass stuffed into their mouths from being thrown from cars and skipping 100 yards through hay fields, or pinned into the crotch of tree trunks, heroin dealers, hackneyed crooks and gun thieves, some of them inside the department. Blackburn, maybe because of something he learned on the back of a horse, bucked traditions and the status quo when it suited him. This was a menagerie of poetry, sidearms and quick wit.
He rode away after his term was up, worked as an investigator and then as a timber cop, something he still does, even at 79.
Through all of this though, there was something else: Blackburn and his wife, Peggy, raised many things in their time together, from kids and grand kids, steers, mules, stock and dander.
Through it all they grew maggots. They were bait ranchers, raising the squirmy little fly larva (“Take a right at the cafe and follow the flies,” Blackburn used to tell visitors) to sell to anglers, a business that grew from the dead animals, road kill and neighbors’ cows or horses where maggots cleaned the dead flesh, to an enterprise that spread from The Rockies west to the coast.
Their company, the St. Joe Bait Company is still around, and the couple still manage to make enough money from it to keep it up, despite the daily inconvenience of dipping maggots into chewing-tobacco size cans, filling orders, invoices and making sure the parcel carriers ship on time to their 60 or more vendors across 4 states.
They have help: Grandkids and family members pitch in when the couple vacation to their Mexico retreat in winter. Mostly, however, it’s Peggy filling orders (“It’s funny, nobody ever seems to show up when we invite them for pot roast and rice.”) and Joe chiming in (“I’m going to retire and raise a lot more maggots. That’s everybody’s dream, isn’t it?”).

-Ralph Bartholdt

Years, actually

2011-06-12T14:13:00.001-07:00

The little ones plying Anderson Lake/Ralph Bartholdt

My oldest daughter was blonde and in diapers when I last fished here.
Summer, the lake was lower, the shoreline was silted and knuckled in driftwood. Rotting mayfly carcasses piled in the shade under the cottonwoods where water had receded and ducks with second broods idled in the marshy backwater gabbling and diving for snails.
It had been a long time since last I fished here.
Years, actually. My oldest daughter, her hair purple, or school-mascot red, is vying for a driver’s license and pines about the small incongruities that threaten to blot her high school “career.”
Back then, on that August day, she was lathered in sunscreen, her cheeks bulged, no shirt to her shorts, wearing saltwater sandals she touched with an extended finger the bright sunfish we pulled from the water. She giggled and ran back and forth to slide a stubby index finger along the sides of each fish until we caught the young pike. Its gnarled jaw and spike teeth made her scream and run for her mother’s arms, tears glimmering on her red cheeks.
Today, I dropped her at the park. School was out and she needed to measure the freedom she pined for, read about all winter in the novels she lugged in her backpack, and envisioned while watching young people television series that bear no resemblance to anyone’s future.
She had her cell phone and iPod, small scepters of conformity with daily affirmations to the status quo. Her fly rod leaned in the woodshed where I stashed it after a casting lesson a year ago. Mom will pick me up, she said, and then left with two boys her age who looked like out of work bellhops at a downtown dive.
I drove the two youngest ones, 5 and 6 respectively, north out of town on the highway.
They were glum.
Why can’t we go to the park? They asked. I want to go to the park.
You don’t want to fish?
No, they chimed.
For them, being of the same mind was as rare as rain on a sunny day.
A few miles later we stopped along a side road to watch an osprey through binoculars.
Osprey, I said. Or, fish hawk.
Their spirits picked up.
A king bird swooped from a power line, kingfishers chattered. The sun charted the asphalt and the air smelled of water.
The planking on the steel bridge spanning the river pounded under our tires as we crossed, then rolled onto the dike dropping to the lake road and its fine, floury dust.
In a wide spot where the road crumbled to the pebbled shore, not far from where my oldest daughter, in diapers then, feared for the pike, I threaded hooks with worms as the kids squinted listlessly into the afternoon sun.
Who will catch the first fish? I asked.
Me, they said.
Who will catch the biggest fish?
I will. No, I will. No you won’t. Just watch. You don’t know how. ‘Better than you, huh, dad?
Biggest fish gets a quarter I said. The bobbers plopped at the edge of a weed bed and then there was much talk of the largest fish and how many at once and that one time at another lake when we hooked fish after fish after fish. The kids scrounged the shoreline for sticks to use as alternative fishing poles, they built a pretend fire ring in the road and filled it with leaves and roasted pretend marshmallows and as the bobbers dipped and I called them to reel, they grew older and stern and gave each other advice.
They dragged fish through weeds, broke some off, jibbered, jabbered, and held high the ones they landed, asked to eat them and we let each of the bright sunfish and the slim yellow perch back after much imagination and holding and getting thumbs pricked on dorsal spines.
Is that a poky fish, dad? They asked when more pint-size trophies were landed and the sun edged slowly to the tree line as shadows crossed the road. The water, which had sloshed with waves earlier, laid down flat as sheet metal.
We hooked a fish that ran out into the deep and my son pointed the 3-foot pole’s rod tip at it. I carefully relieved him, loosened the drag and got the fish near the weeds before it dove and ran, unspooling with vigor the 4 pound test line.
Nearer to shore the line bumped back and the big fish was gone. Reeling in, a small perch, eyes bugged, tooth marked and raggedy finned looked like it emerged from a dream at the end of the hook.
Pike must have grabbed him, I said.
The kids agreed and played out the scene in the road as I reeled in the lines and packed up.
Do we have to go?
It’s getting late.
Aw.
Which one of us caught the biggest fish?
Both of you.
I think she did, the boy said.
You, said the girl.
You both earned a quarter, I said.
Our tires raised dust and drummed the wooden planks of the steel bridge.
We headed back, jibbering, jabbering, loaded with fish tales and a promise that we would be back to this lake.
Soon, actually. And more often. Maybe next week.

-Ralph Bartholdt

May day pike in North Idaho

2011-05-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

Pierce and Carney with a trophy North Idaho pike that hangs in Fins and Feathers Tackle and Guide Shop in Coeur d'Alene. The men started the North Idaho Pike Association with a page on Facebook/Ralph Bartholdt

Its body stiff as a board, it doesn’t blink, but maybe a series of successive waves results in an undulation of its fins, a flip of tail that causes a weed stalk to flinch.
Cast there.
That is how 19-year-old Ben Carney picks up the northern pike in the shallow bays of his favorite north Idaho pike lake.
He fishes Hayden for pike whenever he can, and he often targets the same animals because, he says, pike are territorial, and especially with smaller fish, you can often cast at a pike that you hooked near a certain structure, even a clump of grass, and drag in the same fish.
He doesn't keep the fish he catches, choosing instead to toss them back into the lake for other enthusiasts to hook.
Dan Pierce, 45, a former millworker who prefers to spend his waking hours casting plugs and tube baits into aquatic cabbage patches is Carney’s fishing partner.
Standing at the edge of Hayden Lake on a glum, late spring day with snow spitting from a sky the color of concrete Pierce describes a fight with a specific pike.
“It was down there in the cabbage and we couldn’t get it up,” he says. “It just sat there.”
The fishing line was weed-wrapped and the fish was content to hunker in the foliage until Pierce reached down from the boat’s gunnels into the water with a net, bumped the pike on the head, crowded him into the net and hoisted the fish to the surface.
Pierce and Carney are anticipating, with relish, the coming season’s pike tournaments. Two of the men’s favorite tournaments will be on Lake Coeur d’Alene’s southern end, a place Pierce knows well.
It is where he caught his first fish as a boy, and where his heart often travels when time doesn't allow him to be there.
It was on Hayden Lake, though, that both men caught their biggest pike, a 29-pounder for Dan and a 19 pounder for Ben.
For these guys, pike fishing is more than salad. It is gravy.
“It’s adrenaline,” Pierce said.
Ben caught a half dozen small snakes on a recent day as he forged along the water accompanied by snow, a peppering of hail, but no other anglers. He patiently anticipates this month's higher water when big pike move from the depths to the shallows for some aggressive spring feeding.
“In mid-May, when the water is up, the pike are going crazy,” Pierce says.
The men focus their efforts in the shallows, throwing spinnerbaits and spoons at weedlines.
Silver minnows with a trailers or big-bladed spinners are the chosen hardware.
There are other methods: Bank fishers toss dead things, herring, smelt, suckers that are threaded with treble hooks and strung through big bobbers.
“Pike hit hard,” Ben says.
With no season, bag or possession limits, Northern Idaho is wide open for pike anglers to pursue their favorite quest. With its many lakes holding big pike, anglers like Pierce and Carney are in the right spot to pursue their passion.
Hayden Lake has long been known as a great pike lake, the men concur, but “it gets fished pretty hard,” Pierce said. “Coeur d’Alene Lake is bigger and is always good for pike.”
The state record, a 40 pound 2 ounce northern pike was hoisted from a nearby Lower Twin Lake last year. A few days later, a 32 and a 36 pounder were also taken at Lower Twin.
The men started a club called The North Idaho Pike Association with a page on Facebook.
Although mid-May shakes the arms and jiggles the jowls of many north Idaho pike anglers, it doesn’t end there.
“It’s good all the way into October,” and later, Pierce says. “If you can handle the cold, you’ll catch them.”

-Ralph Bartholdt

A more refined version of this story appears in Northwest Sportsman Magazine's May issue.

Tell Me a Story

2011-05-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse.I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

-Robert Penn Warren

Making change

2011-04-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

Spring brown/Ralph Bartholdt

We passed the road south of Twin Bridges and had to back track.
It had been an uneventful morning and why I was here.
At Clark Canyon Reservoir earlier that day the wind scowled, tossing the water hard and dark like working mohair against the grain with a dog brush. We cast into it, threw our rod tips up like a mast, stopped at 12 o’clock then wrenched the forecast into the wind to make the line shoot the gale like a broken arrow.
Whitecaps sloshed at our thighs.
I dreamed of chicken sandwiches with red wine gravy and cabbage, lifted the rod tip, pumped the line and sent the hardware hard into the wind.
It landed out there with a sploosh.
Barely audible.
Again and again.
The other fly fishers, all heavy with expectation when they rolled their pickups to a stop along the reservoir’s miles of beaches, had already gone and it wasn’t noon. Their faces shined with wind burn, their sights set on the nearby rivers where they did not expect to catch big rainbows like the ones they came to hook at the reservoir: The ones that cruise the shoreline at ice-out. The ones that growl and leap and bust your line.
They left to hunt other fish, maybe brushy bank browns in the Beaverhead with a cracked beer in their packs to sip quietly as the wind chugged like a train on the ridges above them.
We stayed on for a while until the effort seemed fruitless and discussed the matter over a burrito at a vendor in Dillon.
Otra mas, por favor.
Then we trundled through town north to Twin Bridges, missed the turn, did a U in the drive where they make the fly rods, found our way and headed west to Glen.
This country is hollow with memories like wind in a metal pail. Rusty barbed wire snaps from the sandy soil like snakes. Great Falls Select beer and Highlander cans half eaten by decades of rain, snow and heat crown scrap metal heaps. Girdled by beaver, cottonwoods wait to be toppled. Brushy dogwood rims streams. Trailers, line camps and shacks, muddy pickups out front and wailing cattle with their tails in the air are the landscape. Horses stand on the shoulders of swales with manes adrift watching cars pass with a noble disinterest, as if their day will prove larger in the next draw.
In the dirt lot at the Pennington Bridge we straddled a down fence and fished the river to the road realizing later we had, as many anglers before us, crossed private property . The scenic route ended at barbed wire where a sign facing the other direction warned Absolutely No! And another, Positively Not!
We bowed.
Having caught nothing in swirling water the color of steel, we drove upriver to Notch Bottom and the absolute knowledge of fish there and a bite that was on.
I read a story Nick Lyons wrote about this place. About getting lost, asking for directions and a futile attempt at punctuality in his effort to meet for fishing somewhere nearby.
He ended the day with a marginal afternoon catch.
Our day ended like that.
On the bank of the Bighole not far from Melrose we stripped out of dank waders and fleece, pulled on jeans as we watched last light fall on an angler whose elegant roll casts covered the current midstream from his place, waist deep near shore.
Then we drove north to Butte for beers.
Wind vanes had stopped screeching, the day turned less restless. There wasn’t much happening. It was why I had come.

-Ralph Bartholdt
.

Roll casting in the livingroom

2011-04-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

Learning the loops/Ralph Bartholdt

NORTH IDAHO-I think I will learn something today.

The learning like a long cast should stretch into the middle of the month when I am certain the high desert water that I plan to fish will no longer be ice-fringed, and the trout that live there will cruise the murky shore gobbling midge worms that kick and scream in their ascent from the bottom.

It has rained enough in the past couple weeks in North Idaho that someone I know asked if we will float away.

She is new to the area and floods are not uncommon where she is from.

No, I said. Not us. But in the valleys along the Panhandle’s two big trout rivers rough edged with mountains still snow laden, those folks are battening hatches and pulling out canoes.

We should visit there, she said. Water’s too high to fish, I replied. So, it’s not worth going.

Instead, I walked into the small store where the bearded man like Phaedrus unboxes used books from caches across the country, names, labels and prices them before slipping them onto shelves like algorithms: A little pencil flex here, a scratch and calculation there and then the terminable lodging place and the next equation.

I bought seven of these books from the section by the window where, through rain splatters, I could watch my son sleeping in the back seat of our car parked outside.

These books have names and their authors too:

Joe Brooks, Nick Lyons, John McPhee, The Compleat Brown Trout, Float Tube Fishing, The Quill Gordon In Popular Colours, How to Fish a Streamer in a Gully Washer and something about bark canoes.
I carried them under my arm to the counter and Phaedrus wearing a white T-shirt, sweatpants and soft slippers rang them up and gave me a 35 percent discount after punching the numbers on the small machine with the spool of paper as wide as monopoly money.

I gave him cash. He thanked me. The rain danced on the book covers as I struggled to dump them into the back seat beside the sleeping boy and away we went, my dozing son and I into the day for some light reading.

So far, I have learned a thing or two about brown trout. A chapter called Management and one called Ecology most interest me, but they require careful wading and I’m just shin deep.
I bounced to another book and a story by one E.G. Zern, called A Day’s Fishing 1948, that captivated me like those long features on far off places written by foreign correspondents with a foot in the grave, a hand on the bottle and a check in the mail. I wondered when I was through, if the writer was the the same guy who had the column on the last page of Field and Stream for 30 years. The one that hooked me on outdoors and writing both when I was a kid.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/27/sports/ed-zern-83-writer-for-field-stream-and-conservationist.html

Another book meticulously describes the hand twist retrieve, which I have always just called scrunching line. It’s supposed to crawl a bug on the bottom of a silty lake to entice the big trout that scrape muck with their bellies, but I have not used it to much positive effect.

This book is a thin treatise on fishing lakes that pop like blood blisters out of the caked dirt of Washington’s scrub country or the schist and sage flats of Eastern Oregon. Like many books heavy with instruction, it is also a tonic for insomnia.

So far this morning, there has been a lesson on tippets,something called a Galway cast, and automatic reels, “The automatic reel is widely used and a longtime favorite with many trouters.”

I prefer to smack banks with line I buy in the bobber section of the Gas n’ Grub. It’s cheap, doesn’t require you read a manual, and it usually doesn’t break even when a gobbler trout, who lazily ate the conehead streamer, gasses the scenic route through bank debris.

Automatic reels of course were made for steel ferrules and fiberglass. Both dropped from the landscape along with the salesman in the Corsair who sold them.

The Galway cast is just another deterrent to a kid with a fly rod who can learn more by watching the scene in “The Movie” with the metronome.

I learned a lot this morning.

And I think I will learn some more.

I will not wear hats as the men in the photographs in these books wear. I will not, it is clear, wear Irish tweed flat caps on the river unless one day I’m feeling animated and blessed with the juice of barley. I probably won’t don a felt Tyrolian walking cap accessorized with tail feathers of a capercaille. You won't any time soon catch me in an Argentine beret. Maybe a baseball cap.

Someone recently said hats are back, but they are not.

It’s supposed to rain some more and when it is done I will drive east slowly toward the Rockies and water I know fishes well.

I will sleep on the floor of a friend’s livingroom and drink McDonald’s coffee and stand on the bank as the wind makes ghost noises smacking the water until I catch the attention of a trout. They are big there and don’t care too much if your line is $75 clear, slow-sinking or frayed floating from three years ago.

Until then, I’ll keep learning though, and fish from my place in front of the coffee table where my bare feet rest remembering the feel, at each false cast, of damp, stocking foot waders.

Ralph Bartholdt

To Jeff Green, a fisher who learned on the St. Joe, angled all over, drifted rivers and never gave up learning, trying and casting. Until his last.

Heikkila's woods

2011-04-01T09:40:00.001-07:00

Long-time Harrison Flats resident Don Heikkila was recently recognized as Idaho's Tree Farmer of the Year/Ralph Skookum

HARRISON-For 64 years Don Heikkila has lived on a farm at the edge of a mountain that overlooks Lake Coeur d'Alene.

The farm was homesteaded at the turn of the century and later sold to Heikkila's father. It edges a plateau that towers over the azure waters of the lake and is fondly referred to as the Harrison Flats.

Compared to a pine board, or the plains of Dakota that many early homsteaders to the area left as they came looking for water during the Great Depression, the Flats don't deserve the name.

They wobble, careen and disappear in wooded swales and scrap-rock gullies filled with fir. A northbound traveler on Hwy 97 who breaks from the wooded hills of Peterson Creek doesn't notice this. He or she see only the vast open ground from Indian Mountain, where Heikkila's farm is, to Lamb Peak miles away with nothing in between but rolling hay fields.

The land was cleared a century ago by settlers, the pioneers of what then was a high plateau of larch, fir and pine with cedar mixed into the draws. In return for a plot of workable farmland, they agreed to improve their sections, so they took to cutting trees, pulling stumps and raising wheat.

Heikkila, a historian of the area, knows well the stories.

And he knows that the early settlers would frown on what has happened on many parts of the Flats:

The trees have come back, namely they were planted by tree farmers, many of whom are Heikkila's neighbors.

The settlers, Heikkila says "would be spinning in their graves, after all their toil" to remove the timber 100 years ago, selling bolts to steamers docked at O'Gara Bay, or to the Johnsonberg mill on the southern Flats for rough cut lumber.

But, Heikkila says, "The soil is better for growing trees than it is for growing wheat."

The former soil and conservation district board member who served on the state's soil and water commission under three governors, was recently awarded Idaho's most prestigious tree farm award.

Heikkila was named Outstanding Tree Farmer for 2011 at a recent gathering in Moscow.

For many years beginning in the late 1940s, his family raised wheat and dairy cattle on their 400 acres. Heikkila raises beef now.

And trees.

Big trees.

The trees have always been there, on his land that rises from the Flats like a calf elk arching its back until it crests at the spine of Indian Mountain facing east. The towering firs and tamarack are not the handiwork of tree planters with sacks of seedlings dancing between hoed rows. Although he supplements timber harvesting with plantings, the forest is in its original state. His 240-acre wood is a mixed stand of diverse native species of all ages from seedlings to mature ponderosa pines.

In a way, the farm and its woods is an anomoly in a region of cut and slash developments with little regard for what came before.

Like his homestead, Heikkila is a bit of an anomoly too.

A sign on the long, bumpy driveway to his farmyard is in Finnish welcoming neighbors to a summer get-together in his forest. Heikkila has in the last decade or so reacquainted himself with his Finnish roots, and is president of the regional chapter of Findlandia Foundation National.

He is also a newspaper editor. Since 1967 he has edited and contributed to the Harrison Searchlight, the area's annual historical publication rife with biographies and little-known facts of the Flats, Harrison and the south lake community.

As families move chasing jobs or better climes, Heikkila is one of a handful of old timers - there are some that are older, but not many - with a foothold quietly planted in the soil where he was raised, never having left, or strayed very far in more than six decades.

And like the barn on his farm, which was built in 1911, he melds well into the menagerie of woods, water and the fields that were once, long ago, made to raise wheat, but prefer the shadow play of trees.

"Not too many people have lived here longer than 64 years," he says.

-Ralph Bartholdt

Al's toms

2011-03-12T19:44:00.000-08:00

Retired St. Maries Middle School teacher Al Shaw has long been a fan of longbeards/Ralph Bartholdt

ST. MARIES—It's just Al now.
His boys are grown and leaning toward their own families.
But there was a time when spring had Al in the woods with a son sitting between his knees on the damp ground. A few yards away, at the edge of the alley that the firs made towering over a strip of greening grass, clover, and the needles of Ponderosa pine, another son sat with his back against bark and a shotgun tottering on his knees.
There might have been a shhh on Al's lips and then a scratch on a slate call, and maybe a putt putt from the reed in his mouth as a shadow crossed and uncrossed the bridge of his nose.
There was a bunch of those boys. Four sons, maybe five.
Al from out East, decades ago.
Still the collared talk like a voice in a tunnel.
"Boston."
"Coffee."
The non-rhotic, the falling dipthongs or lack of this.
"Fur."
"Butter."
He traveled to the University of Idaho for a teaching degree.
And the first time he heard of an opportunity to gun for toms took his memory back to the outdoor magazines he paged as a child.
Names like Osceola, Gould's and Rio Grande were recalled along with the dim light of a bulb on the bed stand, the musty smell of an attic room where siblings snored.
That first hunt in a bumpy pickup took him to the land south of Lewiston. It introduced him to a brand of bird called Merriams on the Joseph Plains, a knuckle ridge of yellow pine that broke off in a deep slant to the Snake River Valley on one side, and the Salmon on the other.
He didn't kill a bird.
"It was sort of a buck fever," he will say.
But he learned he could talk to them.
This communication hooked him, on that slope, along the edges - always the edges - of the yellow pine with the greening sunflowers, Douglas clover, larkspur and loosestrife.
He learned other things along the way: How hens pecked their way toward a gobbling tom, yelping as they came slowly, picking lethargic bugs from the dew wet grass, snapping pine seeds, their necks like swivel sticks, their eyes like magnets to movement.
A tom would meet them halfway.
Luring him the rest of the way was magic.
It was Al sitting with his back against a tree in the morning shadows at the edge of the feeding lane, green paint on his face, the shotgun perilous and old, its mechanism smooth, its wood slick to the grip.
He would coax a tom to come further.
It's better over here, he would say with the reed call and the slate.
I'm over here. See for yourself and the long beard, always that, would turn blue in the face, would wag and fan. The bird's booming was a bass speaker in your chest.
It's been over 30 years since the first time out there on the Plains, and maybe a year or two since the last time.
The learning was handed down long ago.
The sons are grown and leaning toward their own families and Al has an old pickup, and a hankering come spring to be out there again, in the greening forest with the last frost or early dew, first light picking its way through the fanning limbs of firs and pine.
He has a few grandsons, he says.
It may be time for them.
Just to learn.
To sit quietly between Papa's knees in that first light as a hen decoy bobs in a gust where the grass mixes with pine nuts and the slate call says peep peep. The reed call in Papa's mouth makes that cackling sound of a bird coming off a roost and then the soft yelps.
A gobbler, where is he? Spouts a melee.
The sun wedges through the trees.
The boy's eyes big.
He is quiet.
Papa on the call and then the tom, face blue as turquoise, waddle like pomegranate, fans a tail and drags a foot like a receiver.
The wind comes up.
Papa, his cheek on the smooth of stock, an eye squinting, whispers.
Cover your ears.

-Ralph Bartholdt

A hunter must be 10 to 15 years of age on April 8 to hunt in
the general season youth hunt (April 8-14, 2010 and 2011).
Two turkey tags - one general and one extra tag -
may be purchased for the spring turkey season that starts April 15. -- Idaho Fish and Game regulations

Longer Days

2011-03-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

The road bumps up an incline like a roller coaster with the chains underneath clinking and rattling on a rail.
Passengers are jostled, the driver of the car or pickup considers suspension and what this road might jar loose, or fracture.
The vehicle moves through low light under canopies of yellow pine, past glades snow smattered with deer raising their heads and skewing their ears as they eat greening shoots.
Mud makes a rubbing sound in the disc brakes, cakes in the fenders and speckles the paint.
Drivers and passengers shield their eyes now to the sun, its last sharp rays, setting over a lake - what else but one of North Idaho's many lakes - and then the car stops.
Sunset time from up here is electra.
Winter is almost gone and the days are getting longer. We know this instinctively. That is how we made it to March. For this is the best month.

Here's how it works:

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/coeur-d-alene-idaho.html

Hold on! Another North Idaho spring is rattling the bush.

-Ralph Bartholdt

Uncle Bud

2011-03-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

Bud Frasca in his fly shop at 9751 North Government Way in Hayden/Ralph Bartholdt

HAYDEN—Bud Frasca grew up an elbow nudge away from trout rivers with names like Batten Kill and Ausable.
He worked in New York’s famous William Mills and Son fly shop – around the corner from Ground Zero - where he learned the nuances of fishing for trout with bamboo and flies.
The former book publisher and later, mortgage broker, came West at the behest of a friend and immediately fell on the opportunity that its waters provided.
He fished the big name rivers and many of the region’s unnamed streams and the spring creeks that aficionados flock to like gourmands to duck liver.
Retirement brought him to Idaho where he operates his Northwest Classic Tackle shop on North Government Way in Hayden. For many years he has imparted his passion and love of flyfishing to anyone who jingles the bell above the door.
This month’s column in Northwest Sportsman Magazine is dedicated to Bud.
Grab a copy at your grocer’s magazine rack and head over to say hi.
He has a story for you.

—Ralph Bartholdt

Hunting in the snow

2011-02-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

North Idaho creek in winter/Ralph Bartholdt

NORTH IDAHO—The moose sat in a square of open ground under the fanning scales of cedar.
We found them after a heavy snow that had driven the deer into the woods.
It was whitetail hunting season and the trail that left the highway ended at a gate. The gate was locked, so we hoofed it through the trees pushing ahead of us the new snow that silenced our footfalls, listening to the wind in the tops of the tamaracks and watching snow dust sparkle as it blew from the high limbs of firs.
The forest opened into small clearcuts of an acre or more before closing in and opening again. The clearcuts grew larger until we came to a swath of 40 acres or more, partially logged, meaning the bigger trees had been selected and pulled out leaving patches of young growth like the cedars where the moose bedded keeping out of the wind.
We watched the two bulls from across a small draw.
Their eyes had given them away: A glint, and the the flick of an ear, their rumination, large, dark shadows in a spindly growth of trees.
The binoculars were passed back and forth as we measured palmed antlers, points, the sheer volume of hair and bone.
We considered the bulls tucked under the low hanging cedar boughs with a fine vantage to discern friend or foe, and they considered us back.
This went on for a while.
Brushing snow from adjoining stumps as stools, the rifle was laid over legs. We waited for passage, or a young buck to emerge anxiously from the forest.
Then the moose rose like someone readying for work, somewhat grudgingly, maybe the wind had changed, or they had caught a whiff of a predator far off.
They were unhurried. Long legs poked brush and slash, the animals tip toed through snow into a gully and out of sight.
We found no deer that day, but despite what has become an occurrence that can be chalked as common in North Idaho - seeing moose - the memory of the two bulls remain.
Last week, a different hike, nothing in season but whitefish and trout, and armed not even with a fly rod, we hunted for a stream.
The map showed it as a thin, broken line. Telltale of a seasonal gurgle.
Maybe the mapmakers had run out of ink, we said. Or the photographs used for their work lost site of the creek from 15,000 feet.
It was our duty to investigate.
I had fished this North Idaho stream before, in summer at bridge crossings, when flows were high enough to cast for small bass. I had heard it held one of the few self sustaining populations of brown trout in the Panhandle, a fact that coaxed.
I had also been turned back before from finding the haunts of these browns.
Brush. So thick that crawling on hands and knees in waders and a fly rod seemed at first comical before becoming futile.
Bugs, thorns, heat and the call of a cold beer waiting on the floorboards of a pickup with its chrome bumper pointing toward trout water more easily accessible played a large part.
But it was February and what else to do on a day that threatened to boil with more snow?
We parked on the road, stashed the map behind the seat and tromped through the woods following the GPS that was tucked deep in our gray matter.
We didn't get lost.
It could have been worse.
The snow was hard enough to walk on. We broke through and pushed on.
The sound of water, the gush of stream free falling over rocks gurgled in our dreams maybe, but all we heard was wind, a jay calling and the peep peep of small birds.
This went on until we broke into the mode that says, hey, what a beautiful day to exert yourself aimlessly and then we stood high on a ridge and the sound of running water danced vividly through winter's calm.
Below us the stream flowed fat as a heifer loosed from the hay bin.
This was one of those moose moments. A time to consider. To stop and watch and extract.
The stream I had for several years attempted to find - and had found on a number of occasions in much smaller, less robust form - was as I had imagined it years ago, after all.
It swirled under cut banks, ran swiftly through chutes, arched and shouldered in meandering turns and piled up behind log jams.
The water was clear enough this modest mid-winter's day to count rocks on the bottom.
Cedars old and stately like back woods politicians who lost their minds leaned in rumpled attire quietly over the water from the banks all around as if in contemplation. No sound but wind and the water now, boiling in places, swirling slow and softly in others.
We crossed the stream and climbed the opposite shore.
Deer and moose tracks carved paths in the snow that was littered with droppings, needles, spaghnum dander, strands of hanging moss and brown buds.
A place to come to.
We brushed snow from a fallen tree, made a bench of it and considered the water.
We sat for a while.
Watched the current like paint from the tip of a badger-hair brush.
It would be sunny when we came back to fish, and midweek.
We told ourselves this without speaking.
No one would see us clad in waders toting fly rods through the woods in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter.
We would be off hunting trout, we told ourselves.
Brown trout.
Roll casting under the hanging limbs of ancient trees.
Chasing North Idaho browns, those snipe of snow-jacketed, midwinter streams.
And remembering it as bearing a certain panache much later.

Ralph Bartholdt

.

Winter dirt, North Idaho

2011-01-30T16:09:00.000-08:00

Dirt road on Rathdrum Prairie in winter

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

HAYDEN—One of the remaining undeveloped stretches, Wyoming Avenue runs west from Huetter Road across the Rathdrum Priaire attracting runners who like the solitude, falconers, dog owners and anyone who wants to admire a piece of the big sky.

Ralph Bartholdt

The running of the pike

2011-01-28T18:31:00.000-08:00

As boys growing up in the great Midwest, when the snow sifted off the fields, lumpy with turned muck and fodder, after owls and foxes were done with their seasonal rituals and the geese howled northward through metal skies, we waited for the word.
Then we waited for dark.
The word was repeated in school hallways, buses, or at Bud and Corky's tavern where we sometimes sat on the hoods of cars in the gravel parking lot sniffing the night air rife with the stale whiff of beer and the lake as the sound of pool balls clacked from lighted windows.
It said this.
The pike are running.
It meant that the northern pike were making their migration out of the lakes into the fields where no farmer's plow could go because of the wet.
They followed feeder streams into woodlots, passing barbed wire fences, slipping through culverts under county roads.
The creeks slithered fat with runoff far into the hinterlands before going dry in June.
The pike wallowed also in the narrows of rivers and the shallows of lakes.
Schools of them, their red gills lifting under hard plates, their mouths showing rows of pin sharp teeth as they splashed and floundered.
Like salmon almost, but with what seemed camouflaged armor they stacked up like trucks on the turnpike as they patiently waited to spawn.
As boys, we knew where.

This is a poem I wrote years ago about the pike, the boys and young men who, for the want of what it is that keeps people within the perimeters of the law, a surfeit of curiosity and a seeming lust for adventure, however mainstream, chased spring pike.

There was a warden too, freshly minted, fresh out of the academy and the army before that, who was the cat to the mouse of misdeed. He was feared because he was fearless.

It sweetened the pot.
As kids, we met fearless with a little of our own.

Part Of What A Poacher, Sitting On His Cot In County Jail
Relives During Another Sleepless Night In Spring

Watch the pike,
Its eyes opaque as shell,
Its dorsal fin poking
Through the murky sheen
Of springs rapacious flow.

The fish is drugged dumb,
Full of milt and miasma
In the flashlight's stunning beam.
Now lift an implement

And know the distance to the highway,
How long it takes the game warden
Madly running along the riverbank
Ducking limbs, brush whipped, sweating,
To reach you.

In full spawn, the pike know it.
The ones on the shore flipping their tails
coating themselves with sand and their own blood.

Let your only fear, if any, be
that you haven't enough fish,
That the largest one eluded you
Or that the moon may soon escape
The arms of elm that have entrapped it.

Never fear the night for its own sake.
And never fear the law.

Ralph Bartholdt

With thanks to the late, great James Whitehead and to Matt Smythe at www.fishingpoet.com

.

North Idaho Portraits

2011-01-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

Straight from Skookum Photography.

Biography shoots. Let's capture who you are.
One shoot, one price.

Send me an email
ralphbartholdt@gmail.com

or call me

(208) 582-1867

Ralph Bartholdt

Cookies in a tin

2010-12-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

Lebkuchen ready for storage to let the spices grab and permeate.

SPIRIT LAKE—It’s life cake, I tell them.
I put it in tins like my mother used to.
Christmas, and I’ve been hard pressed to repeat the quietude and magnanimity of the season as I learned it growing up.

But I made life cake, one of the types of sweets the recipe of which was never written down, but passed instead by doing, spending days in a flour-dusted kitchen during the Advent until constructing the spicy, German cookies came as, sort of, second nature.

Lebkuchen or Laibkuchen. Pfefferkuchen.
Life cake, body cake. peppercake; a product of the monasteries I suppose, along with the science of genetics, malt beer and marzipan.

When the snow swirled in a northern sky that was less filled with stars than what seemed like eider down my mother — A Prussian immigrant — prepared for the ritual of filling tins with baked goods and setting the plump canisters on the porch outside to be snow-covered and cooled, letting the spices permeate slowly like a seasoned soup.

She lit an Advent candle, turned down the lights and an LP, Handel or Bach, scratched as it turned on the stereo as the Vienna boys choir waited in the wings.

Cardamom and cloves, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, ginger and a dash of rum. Brown sugar makes its rounds, but honey is a main ingredient. The price these days may prevent it, but with many recipes I learned, nothing was really nailed down. The ingredients swayed and depended on what was in the cupboard, what was necessary and what could be done without.

Some time after Thanksgiving my daughters and I took to making Lebkuchen. We had several bowls of dough kneaded, covered and refrigerated to cool before the rolling pin, before the punching out of rounds with the ample lips of coffee mugs, before — sometimes two weeks later — baking them.

We stored the cookies in the freezer for a while, a few tins stayed in the snow on the back porch, and then, one night I popped a lid uncertain if expectations would meet with the reality of having too many years gone since back then as a kid the process was shown to me.

The cookies turned out OK. They were all right.

It was Lebkuchen, no doubt, and I checked the sky for snow.

Along with the thick strings of glitter on the Christmas tree we cut, and the dripping candle wax on holders clipped to branches, the Lebkuchen matched ingredients that I remember from the Holiday and stirred up memories, if you can call them that, or just the essence of a silent Christmas Eve with snow on the grass and stars in the sky and the radio calling for cold, but who cares, there is nowhere to go but here.

I handed the tins around the following days as a gesture. Once opened they revealed a stack of oval cookies with almond slivers on top and glaze, an aroma of nutmeg and cloves, the soft cookies in a bed of waxed paper.

“Try one,” I would say. “It’s life cake.”

And they did, the people at the gatherings. And they liked them too.

You can’t save all the traditions someone said recently, you pass down what you can.

In this case, it’s a room swelling with the perfume of baking, spruce boughs and candles, cookies finally in a tin.

And when you crack them it’s Lebkuchen.

Laibkuchen, Pfefferkuchen and the quiet to draw your own conclusions.

Ralph Bartholdt

Rattling bucks, tire chains and Astrid Lindgren

2010-12-01T15:53:00.000-08:00

Road, ice and snow, November, North Idaho/Ralph Bartholdt

NORTH IDAHO — It was the weather.
Astrid Lindgen’s signature was all over it.
I went out at night to watch the star fall, the massive unveiling of pre-winter’s opera up there in what seemed a sky ready to scrape out a meteor shower, but the ceiling was low and I could smell snow like a barn door opening. It was almost audible like the slow creaking of hinges in darkness, the dense rich odor of a heifer bedded in last summer’s straw by hay rake and pitchfork.
That was last week, but it seems longer.
Heavy flakes were moving over the mountains in darkness and even the chickens roosted without a cackle or fuss, awaiting the whip snap of an early season storm, those heavy downpours that can last for days and pile up snow to the windows before a new front brings rain.
Here it comes.
I had for weeks anticipated the abrupt change of season and without explanation felt a giddiness that I contained until I could decipher its motive.
I walked to the closet by the back door, opened it and felt the woolen trousers hanging on a hook, smelled the leather of boots with lug soles.
I took the snow shovel out of the garage and leaned it by the gate.
The plow was not attached to the four-wheeler, not yet, and I didn’t bother to do it.
Let it come, I thought, without too much fuss or preparation.
I hadn’t gotten snow tires either, or changed the oil in my car. I didn’t tuck flares into the trunk, or cable chains or any of the accoutrements one might in an effort to prepare for 10 rounds of hazardous driving.
I had something else in mind.
In the basement was an old gun in a caliber developed by Ned Roberts that I had purchased as a kid because I liked the name they gave it: “Wildcat,” and because it was good for wild game from deer to pronghorns and elk, outdoor writers like Jack O’Connor said.
I took the bolt from the high, spider web and earwig-cased shelf and slid it into its cold, steel groove until it clicked. Then I felt in a shoebox for rounds.
In a drawer in the woodshed was an orange vest, a hip pack used for agreeable and easy-to-carry items like mittens with shooting vents, a camouflage facemask, an old bottle of deer musk with a twist top so brittle I was afraid to try it.
I rummaged in a cedar box for a set of shed, whitetail antlers that I picked up in the woods years ago on a bench in a stand of pine. They clacked nicely when I bumped them together.
A good pair to rattle a rutting buck.
I piled this jumble on the kitchen floor and went back to work writing a piece I needed done soon, but lacked concentration.
The snow came the next day. It was midweek and I had obligations that despite their magnitude seemed questionable.
There was a pull that more and more beckoned to something tribal, or at least familiar enough to be called tradition.
It was beyond the prospect of a deer hunt, which had always filled the autumn routine like rolling out the studded tires and stowing up the garden hose.
This time, there was another dimension.
The hunt itself was a sidebar to a gathering of memories, I think, and something that I had in past years misplaced.
Winters had been too easy, and when they returned — back to back — I was in no position to consider them for what they were.
Too much on the table.
At middle age, we consider investments misspent, manuscripts rumpled by being read too many times, dog-eared, papering a drawer. We have poems and stories like a diary bulging in a leather briefcase in some closet somewhere, books unread, letters unsent, and news clips, piles of them, scrap-booked and Mason jarred.
In some ways this snow, this front moving in like a heavy forearm of some Finnish miner from the old times, would clear the table before the whole lot of us would settle in and enjoy each other’s reserved, yet sharp-witted company.
And when it came, it didn’t stop. Side roads and some major routes were like Conestoga wagon tracks, slits of icy ruts banked with what seemed dank, or sometimes plush, ridges of snow. On the Rathdrum Prairie it was whiteout at times, Highway 41 was a chiaroscuro, teetering from manageable to nefarious, Fourth of July Pass too ticked like a powder plum bomb ready to blow traffic into a ditch, the next day it was splashes of icy slush and then, next day, clear driving, before another downpour.
I rattled deer. They came in behind brush, huffed and kicked their hooves into snow revealing fall leaves. One turned from a trail and walked to me like a friend. I reserved the shot, took my finger off the trigger and watched.
A man I know knocked one down after luring him the same way while snow poured unfathomably from the leaden sky. The buck was hog-large with tines from five to seven per beam.
“The bucks are plain dumb, right now,” a Fish and Game commissioner told me.
It wasn’t the hunting, I learned, although it brought solace to the table.
It was the weather that cleared the mind.
And at night I pulled out an Astrid Lindgren tale of the Tomten and the Fox, who both wander a farmyard on winter nights, somewhere north, in Finn and Swede country I suppose, in a land so cold and star-filled that it brings its own conclusion.

“The stars are shining in the sky tonight, the snow lies white all around…”

Ralph Bartholdt

Late fall, lake dreaming

2010-11-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

Aspens and the lake, Trestle Creek/Ralph Bartholdt

LAKE PEND OREILLE — I remember once long ago fishing on the north side of Ely Island by the Three Sisters and trolling into the bight and around the rock face where the water opens up with Big Birch Island off starboard and straight ahead there was Big Bay, where steamers once carried celebrities and boxes of booze from Canada to prohibition rankled rum seekers.
It was late fall and the bay — an expanse of open water a few miles across — was silver and still as sheet metal.
On the other side, toward Daisy Bay, the white rooster tail of a boat heading south was a thin line over the arc of what seemed almost an ocean, so far out there was no sound.
The islands were leafless, trees gray and white, dotted with Norway pine, the gray of gneiss and lichen-tipped granite.
I was alone.
My outboard made a putt putt sound, breaking off to cough every now and then like a miner with a Winston straight habit, as my rod tip sounded with the action of a weighted, floating Rapala that sought the lake’s contours.
The tip steadily ticked and I held the rod in one hand and maneuvered the tiller with my knee, or the other hand, mitted against the flat cold.
I chased walleyes and the like.
Very slowly.
That’s what I was after.
There was no one else out there from Tower, down in Pike Bay to Pine Island where the resorts had hunkered down, gathered fire wood, shuttered the guest cabins and loaded their 30-30s for whitetails, or wolves.
The motorized portages were chained and locked. Even the eagles had gone.
The next postcard would read one word, “ice.”
It was a last run around the island from my home on Echo Point and so long ago I can’t remember what I caught.
I want to say a couple middle size fish, cold and sluggish, with eyes bugging like burned out traffic lights, the scales of their dark green bodies rough in my hand, a final tail flip, their toothy mouths gasping, but I let them back if I caught them at all because I would remember cleaning them.
If they were of any size, I would probably have logged that too.
Instead, it was the austere season that rings in me a bell pitched an octave higher than before.
Summer was a note in a cupboard: Lemonade and watermelon.
Fall was two words on a chalkboard by the heaving door: Saw files.
Instead, the season, the tail end of past and the razor edge of present, was the clanging of a bell.
A ship bell maybe. A navigational aid. One toll or two, but that’s it. The rest fell silent as the landscape took over like a gallery watercolor whose story you knew.
Sparse colors, earth tones that foretold change. Waves with freezing spray, birch arms empty of baskets, the horizon a simple gray and water black under falling snow, fine, with a red canoe.
I mention watercolor because I grew up with the medium, without ever being much good at it.
And because I met Andy Sewell in a gallery along Sherman in Coeur d’Alene.
I waited for him to open the door.
It was after 10 and he was late.
Sorry, he said.
No worries, brother.
I am enamored by these, I told him. Paintings of ruffed grouse and trout, of fly fishers on the St. Joe River, of hands releasing a cutt and the water cold, you can tell, the fish patterned deeply like red wine in fall regalia.
They are mine, he said.
Andy grew up in Ketchum and a painting of himself fishing the Wood is part of the collection, along with his posters and Palouse scenics.
He lives in Viola.
It’s a bit of a drive.
Beautiful, I said.
Thank you.
After walking outside the pictures stayed with me.
There’s a book too I read that heightens the season, lakes and rivers, empty banks and shorelines devoid of summer's jubilation. Just the big open of water, sparse as a chart, after the thrill seekers have gone and the sailors have wrapped their sheets and dropped their masts.
Jane Fritz in “Legendary Lake Pend Oreille,” went to Talache, a small gathering of homes along the lake’s western shore where she talked to Russell Keene, 80-something, who still rows a canoe (with oarlocks), not unusually, back and forth to the Clark Fork delta, a distance of eight miles one way.
Despite its foreboding stillness, and the sounds that trickle across it like someone reading from a pioneer’s diary, Keene said he is never lonely out there, dipping and pulling the oars, then drifting maybe, as he spreads his weight, a small dot from up high, in a pinstripe over the lake.
There is breathing. Birds maybe whacking their wings as they push into the sky. The occasional splash of a fish hawk, clouds moving, or no clouds at all as the man, a long way from youthful exuberance, towering closer now to a life thoroughly vetted, sculls across the reflection of sky, and the lake inhaling and exhaling.
“It is peaceful and a lot like praying,” he said. “It’s a feeling like you’re alone with the Creator, and you listen to the deep calm of it.”

That's where Andy goes with his paintings. The dip of a brush. Reflection.
And where I too went with the bow toward Big Bay and the rod tip ticking.

In the deep calm of the season.

Ralph Bartholdt

Trout images at Orvis Northwest Outfitters

2010-11-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

Orvis Northwest Outfitters at Riverstone —
The first batch of my wild trout images are available at Orvis Northwest Outfitters at The Village at Riverstone. They are 8x10, foam backed and wrapped, with some larger photographs and more, bigger, ready-for framing trout and fishing images coming next week. All of the trout were photographed on local rivers, caught on dries and returned to the water, so you may recognize them, you may have hooked them yourselves, and may, if you’re lucky return to catch them again.
I invite you all to stop in at Orvis for a look.

In addition, I have a couple trout images, one framed, at
Angel Gallery Of Fine Arts & Antiques
at 423 E. Sherman Ave.

rb

C. Rodney Wolfe, Jan. 17, 1925 — Nov. 4, 2010

2010-11-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

Renowned St. Maries flyfisher C. Rodney Wolfe died Nov. 4 at North Idaho Advanced Care Hospital in Post Falls from injuries sustained when his pickup crashed on the St. Joe River Road. Funeral services will be Nov. 11 at Hodge Funeral Home in St. Maries.

"You either like my dad, or you hate him. Personally, I love him."
— Annette (Wolfe) Brandvold

So long, Redneck Rod, and if you get in any trouble, well, go ahead.

— Skookum

Winter nights, whitefish and Raiha

2010-11-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Rauno "Ron" Raiha in his shed with whitefish boat/ Ralph Bartholdt

SANDPOINT — Rauno’s hands are like saucers.
Like lead weights on the end of a muscle bar.
He was a gun maker even before he built his home by himself with a $29 Skilsaw, a claw hammer and $2 level, pouring the foundation one wheelbarrow-load of cement at a time.
He bought the land at 18. It was twenty acres along a ridge that rose gradually from Lake Pend Oreille’s northeast shore like a cat arching its back.
Tamarack and alder, pine, fir and poplar.
He paid cash.
There was no standing water, so he dug a ditch and filled it with fish.
It is still there. The fish too.
Spiny rays.
He casts to them when he can’t get on the lake.
In winter he shovels the ice to keep oxygen pumping.
It’s a natural system now, more or less, he says.
“The fish, they all eat themselves,” and don’t need to be fed.
He is a Finn, having caught his first pike as a boy not far from the place where the Rapala family started their dynasty of top water plugs and the finest filet knives on the planet.
He used a length of line with a spoon that he shot bolo-like into a lake.
R-r-r-r-r…He rolls the Rs… “Rah-pah-la,” he says, to show where the accent lies.
His family was friends with the originator.
“He carved his first plugs from tree bark with a jackknife,” Rauno says.
Rauno Raiha prefers fish to any other meat despite his propensity for venison and upland game.
He is a Finn and eels, eelpout, sheefish and the most undervalued fish in North America, whitefish, are all species he has eaten and enjoyed.
Whitefish especially.
That is why I am here.
I want to document his passion for the deep-water fish, the most numerous and under fished species in Lake Pend Oreille.
“If you want to know about whitefish,” someone in town said, “Ron is the guy you want to talk to.”
There are only so many people on the lake who target whitefish, the man said. You can count them on your fingers.
Ron (Raiha) is number one.
I make the trip along the lake and find his driveway and turn the car up the narrow road passing barns and livestock, the road thins and climbs as the woods close in.
Leaves fall. Trembling aspen leaves like gold coins and tamarack needles, wet, make my wheels spin and catch on the climb up the ridge.
The sun filters through the limbs like an old movie.
Somewhere a concerto plays, Sibelius maybe, and fades as the house comes into view.
The shed is filled with slick lumber: Beams, boards all thick and mathematically stacked on stickers.
Rauno is outside with the chores.
A tractor sits clean and idle with a Farmi log-pulling winch on the back.
Rauno wears coveralls and is happy to see me.
Coffee? He asks walking out from the gossamer shade of a deeply yellow maple.
“I am European,” he says, “So the coffee will be strong.”
His house is elegant and sharp as a filet knife, pragmatic and beautiful with Persian rugs and oil paintings from the Baltic Sea.
The walls are wood-sided, mitered and stained.
“There is no paint,” he says. Fir, cedar and pine.
He takes his Romeo slippers off at the door and lumbers, almost, with the slow gait of a laborer in a rectory, as his now-slippered feet pad the floor to the kitchen.
He presents the coffee on porcelain and opens a book of photographs showing Bob Selle, whose family homesteaded the valley north of here and who fished whitefish with Rauno for 40 years.
“He is gone now,” he says as our cups quietly clink on the saucers.
The coffee steams.
Rauno has watched lake whitefish roll on their sides pushing stones out of the way so they can meet the squiggling mud-bottom larva with their small mouths.
Who does that?
He has studied lake whitefish on the surface and under it for decades and has enough material for a book that would educate fishery biologists, but lost interest in writing it.
The Lake Superior whitefish was introduced into the lake in 1898 in an effort to start a commercial fishery here, he says.
It took off for a while and then fell flat after a freak flood sent kokanee into Pend Oreille, flushed down from Flathead Lake in Montana.
Before that, however, loggers, laid off in the winter from work in the woods, came on the ice for whitefish, shipping 20-pound boxes of the fish on trains heading east, 5,000 pounds at a time, Rauno says.
The Evans Brothers — not the coffee makers — had a smokehouse where the fish were cured for the trip, or local consumption.
The fishery was so popular for a time that the state’s only whitefish hatchery was located on Lake Pend Oreille.
But that is like voices echoing from shore.
Like a shoreline that is ice cracked and cold with only the thump of a splitting axe in a block of birch far away as the cold, black lake is motionless under your hull.
It is history not wanted or learned.
The wave runners and 40-foot sailers, the Chris Crafts and ski-boaters, the Gerrard rainbow and spicy sport fishers want glitz, jumpers, wild whooping as sun peels the skin on their backs and they pump bottle beers from big, ice-filled coolers taking pictures with digital SLRs on a lake better known now for real estate than resolution.
As a county marine deputy who oversees 20 officers, Rauno spends his summer saving the crowds from themselves.
In winter he is on the lake alone, his aluminum skiff anchored at both ends as he hovers in the dark over 80 feet of water reeling whitefish in by hand.
He catches enough to eat for a while, fish in the three to six, seven, eight-pound range.
New state records, many of them, but he is not interested in record books.
“I like to eat them,” he says. “They are tricky to catch, so it’s a challenge to get them.”
He eats the mild-tasting meat any way he can.
“I am a Finlander,” Rauno says, “I eat fish soup, fried fish, smoked, baked, any way you can imagine. I smoke them hard as jerky, or soft so you can eat them as a meal at the dinner table.”
Many anglers who snag a whitefish incidentally, as they chase the money fish like Gerrard's, or more recently mackinaws, toss whitefish out or throw them on shore for the birds to eat.
“I would rather throw the trout on the shore,” Rauno says. “I value whitefish more.”
He shoves off winter mornings when the sky is a swirl of stars and your breath trails like smoke. Before the first exhaust flutters on a log truck, before coffee gurgles in a pot at the diner his wake is sloshing quietly as he heads out to his whitefish haunts not long after midnight.
He returns when schoolchildren sidle out of beds, and he is cleaning fish when the first bus light blinks.
When the weather is too lousy and the shore is iced in, he uses a 35 pound kayak, heading out in the dark with a compass, three miles to his fishing grounds.
Rauno is a Finn and a fisherman. He had a charter fishing business on the Kenai once. Worked as a ski instructor. Moved to Idaho to make guns. Built his home. Raised a family. His daughter is a civic engineer in Alaska and fishes in her spare time.
“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he says.
The reason whitefish remain numerous in the lake, rarely caught, with a state record hovering around seven pounds, is simple, Rauno says.
“No one knows how to fish for them,” he says. “You have to go out at night.”
In the winter, with a hand line because their bites barely register.
“You can’t fish with gloves on,” he says.
So hands ache and are often pressed to a boat heater.
The line is spooled onto an angler's lap, the fish removed from a hook, and the weighted hook is rebaited with wool and a maggot, and dropped down, snaking to depths of 80 to 100 feet on the shoals where the fish come to feed on larvae before moving to depths of 300 feet to escape the morning light.
“Whitefish have very photosensitive eyes,” he says.
And their meat is firm and extremely palatable.
“So delicate,” he says.
He caught a 30-pound sheefish — named 'unknown fish' by early explorers — 50 miles above the Arctic Circle a few years back.
“The biggest whitefish I ever caught,” he says. “We ate whitefish for weeks. It was fantastic.”
On this lake though, he is after the smaller ones, a few at a time, so they don’t spoil because whitefish does not freeze well, Rauno says.
Alone in a boat in the dark three miles out with gloveless hands feeling for a bite under a sky that dazzles stars as black water laps quietly against his hull.
He is anticipating.
“You almost have to get your mind down there with them,” Rauno says.
And then yank.

Ralph Bartholdt

Time to roll

2010-10-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

noun Also, free lance.
1.
Also, freelancer. a person who works as a writer, designer, performer, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, day, job, etc., rather than working on a regular salary basis for one employer.
2.
a person who contends in a cause or in a succession of various causes, as he or she chooses, without personal attachment or allegiance.

SPIRIT LAKE — I’m sitting on the cold, living room floor in my underwear.
That’s how the day starts. It’s almost dark and the leaves are coming off the maple like a quiet storm in a far off place where trees fall without anyone hearing them.
It rains. There is more light reflected in the street than the sky.
I am scrounging old notes for names and telephone numbers. I have a fishing story to write for a magazine and need it done.
In my inbox is a note from another editor telling the publication will pay no more than $125 for an article I pitched about a man way up river with a particular knack.
I mull the response.
I send an email to a friend to get the grit out of my craw.

“It's 123 miles from where I live to UpRiver, Idaho (3 hrs approx) regardless of which route ....

5 gallons one way in my car is $30 round trip, plus 10 hours to drive, meet with the man, take a photo, and write the article.

@$10 per hour that would be $130 break-even minimum, for a story that pays $125 maximum.

That's not factoring beer, coffee, a gas station hot dog, or the most obvious: Who works for $10 an hr anymore?

It doesn't take a business degree to see that journalism, even in its most free, unregulated and sans middle managed form, Don't pay.”

Hard lessons, these, for someone who can’t give in. Or, give it up.

I find the notebook and make note of my day: Turn in prints for sale at galleries. Fill out application. Job interview. Make fishing-article phone calls. Set up a photo (the killer, since it requires traveling, which means spending money on gas). Write article, if there’s time. Inquire of vendors if any photos sold.

A friend and former magazine editor is writing for the construction trades. He quit a well-known publication after a tiff when, against his advice it dropped its freelance rates from 25 cents to a nickel per word. The magazine has survived of course in a different, more hackneyed form, touting itself as a good place for new writers to “get their names out.”
Which means of course the pay if there’s any at all is a pale shade of what it was when the magazine was known as a place to read fine, well-written articles and get lost in some wonderful images.

With so many names out there, another one won’t dimple the surface. But writing has always been about gratification. For some, structuring paragraphs about hewn oak doors, gradients of light, or the weave of a jodhpur three-piece duvet cover set is writing enough.

I prefer people and their passions.
I like to drive the muck and rock to meet them, to feel their hand in mine when we shake.
I like looking into their eyes.
To me, that’s what it’s about and you can’t do that from a desk.
The failing of journalism everywhere are the filters of middlemen and women who buffer reality allowing only the soft, unscented air to enter the glass booths.

Once sitting in a back room of a county sheriff’s office where a deputy spread a weapon cache on the floor, autos and semi-autos, boxes of rounds, a grenade even, with bags of marijuana like pillows with plastic cases, we all sat with one foot hanging over our knees and the rain drumming on the windows. I noticed our boots were muddy. All of them. Even the attorney’s. Spackled. Dirt in the soles, polish faded, toes scuffed, but it was the mud that I remember. Trousers were spotted too with the kind of flecks that, when you scratch them with a thumbnail later, they pop dust.

Gumshoeing doesn’t pay and it’s a shame because that is where the stories are.
In my town today, I can walk into the post office to see the trash bins stacked to overflow with the local newspaper. No one reads it. There’s nothing there that hasn’t been discussed at length in the cafes or bars already. The reportage itself isn’t worth the time to peruse because it’s suspect. It’s trolling for ads and those are getting fewer with each edition.

Put a real person on the page, however, in a photo the size of a dollar flapjack so the reader can see the simmer in the eyes of the woman who sells tractor parts and pork sausage from her home in the hills and you’ve got a story that stops people on the sidewalk, that gets cut out and sent to relatives in other time zones, that is saved and read later, maybe twice.

That is called writing, not newspapering. Not anymore.

Everyone knows it, wants it, but it’s too expensive to give because it requires time and a livable wage, so the papers stack up in the post office bins and the news is spread like it has been for centuries: By word of mouth.
And without ads.
Except to say my pickup's for sale.

And the stories are too. Vividly. They make their own pictures.

I dial the anglers who ply the big lake and leave messages. The sky is glassy and dank as a silverfish.

Coffee.

It’s eight.

Time to roll.

Ralph Bartholdt

Leaves falling, river dreaming (Get well, old fisherman)

2010-10-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

C. Rodney Wolfe in his kitchen with one of his creations/Ralph Bartholdt

COEUR D'ALENE — I was going to visit my old friend Rodney Wolfe at Kootenai Medical Center, but they said no.
They said critical and that’s all we can tell you. What newspaper do you work for?
I don’t, lady.
I’m a pal, I said.
Rodney taught me more than I wanted to know about fly fishing and the history of casting dry flies on the St. Joe River.
He taught me to tie three flies exactly until I had enough of his paternal badgering and bad breath as he hovered over me in the small room of his home overlooking the St. Joe River years ago as rain smashed the windows and trout season seemed far enough away to need a plane ticket.
He taught me, as others before him, that blunt talk like a maul means well.
And he taught me to like him.
The other people in that architecturally-sound, sky-rising structure overlooking the traffic that flows in all directions through Kootenai County, Idaho as if there is anywhere to go really outside of rivers, and aside from the roads that lead to or from them, said you must call family if you want to visit.
We can’t let you in, they said.
I was standing there in my waders wet with the cold of the St. Joe River, gripping my custom built fly rod, the one Rodney built, a number 6, in one hand as its tip bumped the ceiling. Carefully I kept the tip from the echoing creak of the steal doors that opened and closed.
The floating line of the fly rod was still caramelized from the cold water that can smell fraggle ice coming, that can taste the bottom so close to freezing, that sups and spits at yellow needles of Tamarack and the leaves of syringa and ocean spray and the poplars’ tremblers that spin like fat coleopterans on the surface.
I stood there.
My ball cap didn’t cover my ears, red from the outside air in the canyons where Rodney Wolfe showed me his fishing holes long ago and the stories that I tried scribbling in a notebook.
I failed, as I sat in the cab of his pickup letting the notebook fall at my feet as the wheels thump thumped upriver.
I listened, thinking what’s the use.
I had a newspaper article to write, then, about the St. Joe, its native species and the man who pushed for years and against odds, the attitudes of his fellow anglers and the game department for a catch and release cutthroat fishery.
Who chided the state for stocking rainbows in the cold mountain stream, who pointed out a bend and said that was the best hole in the river once, before they built this highway and buried it.
As we drove I just sat and listened.
I’ll never remember this, I thought, but the tales were akin to the trees, seemingly tall as hell, and Rodney was a storyteller, a man who pushed against the water, tumbled down banks, rowed and scraped and cast upcurrent a half century before I first admired the wobble of a long rod used to cast a hook on a feather and wondered why.
Sometimes memories come back.
For now, like the whipping on the Big Bad Wolfe, a fly Rodney developed years ago, my mind is tight with only the river running through it.
Maybe that’s how it should be.
The trees on the bank, the rock walls Rodney knew long before the old man from the Palouse in the straw, sun hat I met said with pride he fished this spot since the 60s. And I thought, even then, that Rodney Wolfe had found it 30 years earlier, when there was no road. He hopped the Milwaukee line as a kid — not a college professor — and rode the current down.
Above one of his favorite fishing holes, to the east on a rock ledge where a road now cuts to the tree line, Rodney Wolfe, then a camera buff besides being a student of trout who drank the river water and ate its native fish, and wrote articles on how best to preserve the God’s-own-gift of cutthroat trout after his own years of plundering — a plundering he realized was culprit — better late than not at all … above that place in the river where I one autumn hooked two wonderful hook-jawed fish, a much younger Rod Wolfe once stood with a 35 mm camera and snapped a shot that he earned a blue ribbon for, $50 and a feature in a magazine.
“You know what the most pure lens is?” he once asked me.
The lens that renders perspective closely matching the human eye, so the images made with it have a natural and uncontrived look? he asked.
He shot the river scene from up there with a 50 mm and “Gawd, those were beautiful pictures.”
We stood in the water knee deep. He had his neoprene camouflage waders, a wading staff and a short cast.
He pulled in a series of trout and explained why they were there, under that bank.
Before we trudged out to a different hole he stopped and pointed at the ridge with the mist coming up and the early fall sun like amber, like tree resin, golden, hard with soft edges, and said right there is where he stood with his camera.
Climbed up at dawn. Perched and waited.
“Gawd those photos were beautiful.”
And he meant that the place was the most gorgeous place on earth.
Better than the lauded South Pacific where as a teen he lied to get an Army job to kill the Japs and ended in the islands, wearing GI green and cutting trees.
He worked the woods back home as well, and later the mills.
All of this, long after he learned to tie flies and sold them.
The treatise on trout he wrote while working as a night watchman, a boiler attendant as the erudite college crowd, the ones that breed state officials, scoffed at the rough angler/logger who pinned his pants with bobbies.
He has been in a coma since the wreck, they said.
The wreck on the St. Joe River Road last week when his truck rolled off the side.
Two surgeries: One for a smashed jaw and the other for his back.
Neither one any worth.
Rodney has no shortage of backbone and no breaks can stop his jawing.
What does a man do when he’s asleep like that, but dream.
He’s learning to tie flies again from the gal that lives on the waterfront, the wooden row of plank houses where the steamers moor.
He’s chiding the bankrollers for planting brown trout in the St. Maries River at Canyon Creek.
He’s using his neighbor’s Plymouth rock saddles for hackle, measuring them.
Rowing downstream in a plywood boat casting to runs no one had fished that century.
Making flyrods like my number 6, felling trees with the two-man saws, and later, the kind you can pack on your back.
Scribbling the sparse 19-page treatise that proposed catch and release regulations for the St. Maries and St. Joe rivers at night with the churning umbra of a plywood mill, its scenery laden perfume, pine and fir, the call of dark forests and floating logs chugging around him.
“Single barbless hooks only.”
He's penning.
“Pinched barbs would be acceptable.”
In long hand.
“No powered, mechanical aids allowed to fishermen.”
He is writing colums that appear in the local newspaper under the heading "Huntin', fishin', lyin'."
“Trout over 12 inches should be returned, unharmed to the river … Trout over 18 inches could be considered trophy fish and included in the bag limit.”
Known later as Idaho Fish and Game's slot limit.
He’s dreaming still.
Up there in ICU.
Good dreams.
River stuff.
And I’m standing there in my waders, dreaming too.

Ralph Bartholdt

Gray duck

2010-10-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

Decoy carver Frank Werner of St. Maries/Ralph Bartholdt

Interviews with Frank Werner will air at 7 p.m. Oct. 28 on KSPS Spokane Public Television's Northwest Profiles

Werner is a 2004 recipient of the Governor's Arts Awards: http://www.arts.idaho.gov/focus/frank/frank.aspx

ST. MARIES — Frank grew up in the hard-knock hoodlum neighborhoods of New York where as a teen he was given a choice.
Jail or the Corps.
He chose the latter.
The retired Marine learned about ducks, flat-bottomed boats pushed with a pole and decoys that attracted waterfowl to gunners while working at Camp Lejeune.
He had come back from Vietnam to find his new military occupation waiting: Game warden.
It meant confronting the calloused-hand generations of waterfowl hunters in the Carolina estuaries — who didn’t have permission to be there — at foggy dawn or black-eye dusk.
The confrontations turned tutorial. Soon Werner was learning the pragmatic art of luring birds to decoys.
Werner has a lot of names for the pretty carvings that land on gallery shelves. Art ducko is one.
His carvings, however, are not made to attract sighs, but real ducks, which he shoots.
Despite their ability to bob lifelike in a backwater, Werner’s pragmatic works of folk art are also displayed in galleries accompanied by the kind of dry humor learned in the muck marshes of the inner banks of Carolina and his 20 years in the Corps.
In the St. Maries shop he built himself, Werner carves the birds with hand tools that curl thin peelings to the floor until a block of white pine takes the shape of the migratory birds that dance in his mind like music.

Ralph Bartholdt

Wild rainbows at Hellwig Creek

2010-10-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

NORTH IDAHO — He was a man who raised fish.
The idea assailed him one day as he teetered at the dour crossroads of vexed and perplexed, in those mountains where silence, snow and shadows are all a short time coming with the intention of a long time to stay.
In the summer the rivulets came down from all directions to fill his bowl-like kingdom of moss and meditation.
He walked the land thinking of ways to make it productive. The trees spindly, growing closely together, all reprod, logged when it was easy and the best of them pulled out on the Cat roads that let the only lanes of light into his overgrown swamp.
I’ll grow fish, he whispered, and then said the word aloud.
The voices around him said it too:
Fish.
The word splashed in the humid air and deadened.
But there were no other people near, just the former Marine and college running back with the glossy pate and ruffed hair going gray, hanging out on the sides like a professor of galactic musings who earned his advanced degree from a school he learned of through late night radio.
He teetered at the crossroads, and then went ahead anyhow.
Fish, the man said, digging dozens of holes in the rocky, cedar bottomlands with an ancient backhoe, lining them with rubber mats at $12 per foot and letting the water naturally fill the holes and trickle out over rocks and ridges to fill the next hole like a chain reaction.
The work complete, he planted rainbow trout.
The former running back and Marine, and professor of zingle zangle who lived by himself at the end of the road and then some, in a single wide trailer that he accessed with a mail route JEEP vintage Korea, became a fish farmer with a red, smiling fish logo pasted to the side of a truck once used to ship milk.
It was trout now in the sloshing stainless steel tanks. Rainbow trout mostly and for a while business was as good as it could get.
That was years ago before the game biologists decided against releasing exotic rainbow trout raised extemporaneously into the local rivers, but bow-tie bureaucracy was the least of his worries.
He had neighbors out there in the hollers who liked fish too, mostly at the end of a hook baited with worms.
They took the biggest ones, he said, hauling them out in buckets.
So he took to patrolling his land with a Chinese AK and night vision goggles that he got from a friend.
No one came missing that year or the next, but it’s hard to tell being so far out there with the shacks and the singlewides showing light in the windows one night and then without warning, or a mail-forward slip filed at the post office, the chimney smoke quits and the brush takes over the road.
He telephoned to say someone planted pike in his ponds.
“And you know what they will do,” he said. “They will clean out my trout.”
Years later, after the fish farm had flopped, after the hilljacks, the pike and policies at the fishery department had rendered his ponds to a history of dereliction, and deferred maintenance the surviving trout still dimpled the surface of the terraced water holes looking for bugs.
It was a place where boys from across the hill might sneak in with a fly rod for rainbows gone feral, part of the adventure, of course, was the mad man with the white clown hair and his hunch, who was whispered to be guarding the passage to the ponds with a barrel sticking from a hootch.
With trip wire rigs and pungee pits.
But the leery trespassers, sneaking through the thick timber with a two-piece fly rod never saw him.
Only the small rings of rising trout like glass eyes blinking in the flat, black water under a wheeling sky before they cast.
And the sploosh of the rainbows some as big as 14 inches with their snub noses glistening in the beams of the headlamps the poachers wore at night.
The sky above these water-drop craters like missile silos surrounded by a fortress of trees spiraled with a million stars.
The fish man eventually took to dancing with the law. Cuffs and bars, he spent large chunks of each season sleeping on jailhouse cots, his disheveled hair and white university beard smelling with the stale, dead breath of bad teeth.
He called to ask if I knew what cameras were best to shoot ghosts.
“They are infrared, you know?” he said. “You can see them as orbs in images shot with a real fast camera.”
His next venture may have been as a ghost photographer, but then, I heard the road to his trout utopia was brushed over, his single wide trailer under the Milky Way where he collected the frequencies of extraterrestrials with a 120-foot homemade antennae fell into disrepair.
Raccoons and bears took what was left.
In the riparian 120 acres below his place the streams still gather and fill the tanks and bowls with cold, mountain water. They trickle one after another into the next, like a chain reaction and boys who remember, still sidle in for trout gone wild.
The adventure is part of it: They slink quietly looking for trip wire left from the day when the Marine and college running back with the glossy pate and ruffed hair going gray, hanging out on the sides like a professor of galactic musings, guarded the place.
Sometimes coming down through the brush from a Cat road on the other side of the ridge they stop to listen.
They hear the occasional rise of a fish.
See the rings in the ponds like sound waves seeking the shelter of grass banks.
There’s trout in there, they say.
They call them the wild rainbows at Hellwig Creek.
And they carry them out one at a time, if at all.
Buckets be damned.

Ralph Bartholdt

North Idaho diversions (this time last week)

2010-10-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the neighborhood

Hooked on this

City lights

Fall's concerto with an elk trumpet solo

Overarching concept

The River at big fish canyon

Fish and games dock, Spirit Lake

—Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

A local man surveys his surroundings

2010-10-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

October sunset, prairie, North Idaho/ Ralph Bartholdt

NORTH IDAHO — Evening light like orange cellophane lies uncreased and idle under the old fir in my yard.

It is suppertime. The air outside melts.

I open the front door for the first time today and feel an edge of warmth like a draft under a door crack. It is the perimeter of cool autumn and bumps me as I stand barefoot on the concrete steps under the awning by the flowerpot, cracked clay, and unwatered perennials.

Aphids, small as dander, blue bodied and silver winged dance at the intersection, thousands of them, down-like, in annual ritual.

There is no traffic. The sunlit air is fir scented. A cat slinks along a hedge.

This is where time stops, suddenly, because you have relived this same moment your entire life in increments remembered as magnanimous although nothing in particular unfolds.

Despite the knowledge of the outcome, you wait for the mixture of slanted light and silence to lend insight.

You stand barefoot on the concrete steps in jeans and a T-shirt, the front door left open behind you, thinking about cracking a beer. The coffee pot is tannin-stained and turned off.

You stand idle for a moment in the whiff of pine, of water somewhere, the deft interlude of seasons changing.

The noiseless evening is part of this exchange and there is the mingle of mold spore and plants gone to seed, apples in a neighbor’s yard unpicked and rotting, the maple wants to rustle its reddish leaves with no wind to oblige it. A mower, far off, sputters and whines.

You understand all of this, its foreboding and lack of threat since the first time, as a five-year-old in a world that enjoined you to watch more than participate.

It is an evening like the others, with the potential for apocalypse, for bedlam, for molecules and dust and reason to enter a state of entropy where nothing makes sense, where there is no preponderance, just a race for the end.

You are barefoot, motionless, absorbing for a few seconds, but it seems longer when you turn back inside, hedging your bets, you bankroll the routine.

James Whitehead, the former college lineman whose Arkansas creative writing program was one to behold, who talked as easily of malfeasance, its nobility and shame, as he did about oil rigs and steel string guitars, who traveled with Tom T. Hall and wore suspenders in later years like Southern writers must, once said that we always return to the wound, and it’s true.

I have one on my arm, from a slide down a rocky riverbank to a fishing hole I was eager to try.

Between my shoulder blades too, a deep scrape where the skin is glassy now, from being raked by a broken limb in the elk woods. A chainsaw cut on my shin: Woods work. Eighteen-inch leather caulks, block heel, wet all season left oozing gouges in the top of my feet. A broken bottle gash on my face healed long ago into a nodule barely visible. These are scars.

Just part of the make-up.

The wound is the environment, with its own geography, the landscape that pounded and softened and built each of us into the kiln-fired end piece that faces the shower spray in the morning, or the sponge, and pays through our car windows for latte, or scoops the bargain brand into the Mr. Coffee.

That’s what he meant. And we return there for a moment when we reach for the newspaper in the plastic sack that the delivery person left in the drive under a dark sky when the air is too familiar. And at dusk when, before returning to matters at hand, we use a few minutes to reconnect:

Our mother’s maiden name and her stories. The look she had when she read directions or cooked eggs, and a father’s walk on a gravel road with a stick for the dog, or down the corridors in the hospitals where he worked.

It’s all rudiment and rehashed in those small moments.

My neighbors live this more thoroughly. They are brothers in the house they inherited. One is burly, bearded and rotund as a lawn elf. The other, tall with shoulder length hair going gray wears the T-shirts he wore long ago under football pads, pegged off, showing a belly. They are mid-40s, I guess, with Steve Miller on the stereo and Dreamboat Annie waiting in the wings.

Their yard is a chiaroscuro of old muscle cars, trucks from the 1950s, a Chevy Van spray painted with LSD graffiti, a chicken house with moss on its roof and bicycle parts in a mound behind an overly robust forest of lilacs untrimmed since the Nixon years.

The tomcat that lives under their masonry house is old as Lucifer with bent ears and scars on its face.

They live in the womb surrounded by the accouterments of their history.

Not far from here there is a sunset I have gone looking to find.

Ralph Bartholdt

I was reminded of James Whitehead recently, a man I admired after meeting him in Montana, and whose poems I devoured. Michael Downs was a student of Whiteheads in Arkansas. He reminded me. Downs' book, House of Good Hope, was written in his own place. Back home. On the other side of the continent. Downs was a reporter at the Missoulian. He is online at http://www.michael-downs.net/

Finn, the boy, his river

2010-09-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

Boy and the river, St. Joe, northern Idaho/Ralph Bartholdt

ST. REGIS — What does a kid see when he sees a fish?
He is five and enamored with trout.
He follows me to the river talking the whole way.
He will not stop talking.
I am a good boy, he says, I am almost grown up.
We drive the interstate to Montana, just he and I and it’s morning.
He cried at first because of the hour. He hadn’t rubbed the sleep from his eyes when I stood over him and said, Buddy, let’s go.
His normal ritual includes his mother, but today it was too harshly a man thing, and the streetlights were still throwing umber on the sidewalk and dew, like split shot sinkers, tipped the grass.
He sat by the front door with shoes in his hands and the big newness of heading off in dark to a fishing hole hit him like the first plate of sashimi or cous cous.
Not too appealing.
He needs a hat, I said. And a sweatshirt.
In the car he pealed like a bell until I asked, what do you think they are biting on?
Ants, he said. Maybe.
Winged ants.
We saw ants last time, but used hoppers with some success.
Then, as we drove to the intersection, he straightened his back and explained the nuances of trout food. I think it’s fair to say that I am someone increasingly in need of a lesson from a five-year-old because fresh insight is a wire brush, and more often my mind is old paint and rust spotted.
How far to the river he asked.
He napped and woke up somewhere on the trail, the big broad, semi-laden trail, four lanes wide and abuzz with small cars that cracked the whip on performance with a bit of pressure on their accelerators.
How far to the river he asked.
We flew down Lookout Pass and leaned into the curves. He insisted he needed a bathroom, so we throttled down at St. Regis for overpriced junk food, to pee, and to visit the tanks full of live, bent-nosed fish that will never taste the wild rivers where their genes were spawned.
I got a phone call in the parking lot and when I turned he was peeing on the tire of a nearby pickup with a relieved look as tourists from east of the Mississip took in our Idaho license plates, adding another misconception to their inventory.
Inside, he said, the fish in the tank had grown since he saw them a few months ago.
What kind are those? He asked. What are those?
Rainbows, browns, brooks and cutties.
How far to the river he asked.
He tried out the popguns in the toy section and we left the store heading south over the hard-pack gravel road that will remain hard-pack gravel because Grizzly bears are more prone to cross hard-pack gravel than similarly hard-packed, but black, pavement, according to the people who talk with judges who rule on such things. Thus, this road, one narrow sinew in a 1,000 square mile bit of mountains and woods, will not impede bear movement.
How far to the river he asked.
We hit Gold Creek and turned toward Red Ives and the parking lot where he tumbled from the door to view the water.
I found an old Croc in a fishing tote that I brought because it was dark when I left, so I simply grabbed the entire gearbox.
I found a hat from a fly shop in Montana that I forgot I knew.
And a fly box stuffed with imitations that used elk hair for wings and rusted hooks.
I found some spools of spider wire, the equivalent of 4x to 2x and a wool headed sculpin pattern that a guy down the river insisted will catch bulls. I put it in the pocket of my vest, pulled on long underwear unused since last October and a fall fishing shirt, donned waders and we split down the bank to the rock wall where he cast patiently from shore for the trout that weren’t coming up.
I want to catch a fish, he said.
A fish rose to look at the small boy with the big fly rod.
Then slapped tail and scooted back down to the bottom.
Did you see that? I asked.
He grinned.
They want me to catch them, he said.
There is wisdom in children with fly rods.
There is remorse too, and the inevitable sadness of hooking limbs with a back cast again and again, of reeling line backwards and the mess it can bring, and hours of not catching anything.
And then, there’s the water.
The quietude and forgiveness.
The gifts: Mayflies, fat caddis and carapaces, the dipping pods of moss and water ouzels, the freshets and round rocks smoothed by elements and the kind of time we’ll never really understand and the trout, rising from the bed like holograms, floating for a moment for a bobbing fly too gaudy maybe for this autumn day, before dropping in the water column, seeking out their lie.
And when a fish is hooked and played upstream, the boy, five-years-old with a cap like a Little League pitcher, reels in quickly and jumps from rock to rock.
I’m over here, he says. Wait for me.
Can I touch it?
Wait for me, he says. I'm over here.
Can I hold it?
He scrambles with a fly rod in one hand and hops from rock to rock with the exuberance of a kid testing its legs in a high mountain meadow. Can I kiss it for good luck?
He strokes it with a finger.
Its eyes are big, he says.
He holds the cutthroat until it squirms and splooshes back into the current.
He wants to swim, he says.
He watches it slip into the black, fast moving water.
We head up the bank and he finds a winged bug and shows it. See, he says, it’s an ant with wings. I bet the trout eat that.
At the next spot a mile downstream, he stands on a rock alone, casting.
I want to catch a fish, he says. And he will, sooner or later, and it will be his fish.
You do the easy part, and I’ll do the hard part, he says, meaning he will reel it in.
What does he see when he sees a fish?

Ralph Bartholdt

Old warrior

2010-09-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

Former Coeur d'Alene Mayor Ray Stone in his living room/Ralph Bartholdt

COEUR D'ALENE — Ray Stone was in the Air Corps after he did his basic parachute training with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Big One.
When he got a chance to go back, he took it.
Send me to the 82nd, he said.
That led to three campaign medals including one for the infamous Battle of the Bulge.
He shrugs it off.
“That’s nothing for an infantryman,” he says.
His favorite commendation in the glass case where he keeps his patches, ribbons and medals is a silver and enamel badge an inch high and three inches wide of an infantry musket on a light blue bar with a silver border, over an elliptical oak wreath. The blue bar recognizes the color associated with the infantry. The musket is a 1795 model Springfield Arsenal musket representing the first firearm adopted by the continental military. The oak symbolizes steadfastness, strength and loyalty.
It is called the combat infantryman badge, or CIB, and is a decoration reserved for soldiers who personally fought in ground combat.
“There are people who die for that,” he said.
Stone, a two-term Coeur d’Alene mayor, does not fraternize with many veteran associations, but his library is a neatly ordered assemblage of books military.
The glass case includes a pin from a glider unit. Stone was certified as part of a unique cadre of soldiers trained to use gliders to insert units behind enemy lines.
All of that was from long ago, he says.
As mayor he had other battles including one to pry the Aryan Nations out of Idaho.
“They’d harass by phone,” his wife, Betty, said. “I wanted to get an unlisted number, but Ray said no.”
The beautification of Coeur d’Alene’s downtown began with his tenure as mayor.
“I probably can’t take credit for that,” he says.
There is another story he likes to tell.
One closer to home:
He recently bought a large painting of a bouquet of poppies that hangs in the couple’s living room.
Betty pined after learning the painting she wanted was no longer available but Ray found it one day and nabbed it.
“I bought it for her because I love her," he says. “She really wanted that painting.”
Ray and Betty celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary this summer. Their story is among love stories of the greatest generation compiled by local author Cindy Hval.
The articles appeared in the Spokesman Review and the will soon be published in book form.

Ralph Bartholdt

Headwaters

2010-09-06T15:34:00.001-07:00

Ralph Bartholdt
The average 12-inch cutthroat at the headwaters of the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River in early September

CLARK FORK — We crossed the river bridge and then headed west before climbing out of the frogwater lowlands at Derr Island.
The man had said headwaters.
Meadows, he said, with trout under the banks like grass pike.
Eighteen inches he said, and the phrase, "all day long" was used along with a single word:
"Hoppers," he said.
That was weeks ago, and changes come daily in North Idaho, meaning that weeks ago is a long time gone.
We headed up anyhow partly because of the nip in the air and the clouds that nudged in us the memory of autumns too early and too short, just as North Idaho summers are often too late with not enough time to prepare a basket much less eat what's in it.
The road switched back and offered a dirt berm instead of Jersey barriers at its edge to prevent mishaps, akin in a way, to a silk scarf around a bull riding arena.
We looked back often, or down, at the valley pocked and scarred with water holes, and the big Clark Fork River moving slowly and winded almost like a heavy-bagged missionary so near redemption after the long trek out of Montana.
The road climbed, hit a ridge and we followed it.
It cut banks and edged clearcuts where we stopped and looked back again.
The trees thinned.
The understory opened to mossy sponges and low berries, from fir, cedar and tamarack to tamarack and pine, to stands of lodgepoles you could throw a baseball through.
And the sky became bigger and then we dropped again in elevation, passed Ys and Ts in the road that left question marks, a result of signs shot off posts by har-har ingrates with rifles and shotguns turning the intersections into a no-man's land of where to?
Then the road scissored and dropped and the forests thickened and the road narrowed,and grass grew in the middle.
Scent swirled up genie thick and wild as fog. It said water, small trickles, bugs and fry.
It said moss and decomposition.
Ferns, single celled slime molds and liverworts.
Then we hit bottom.
Right here, I said. This is where the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River begins. We stepped outside and the dog snipped and shot into the stream, crossing, chasing scent.

We fished farther down, waderless, in sandals and shorts. It was 45 degrees, but we wouldn't be long, we said.
We would just fish to that bend.

The river was narrow and the sky was a cauldron watching us move slowly upstream casting.
There's one behind that clump, I said.
Try by the rock, but lift your line so the current won't take it.
That run might have a fish.
That is how we worked.
The dog following on the bank, wet now from the water that was cold as an after-dinner drink. She shook.
Vizsla. No underfur.
The water sluiced over rocks that shimmered as clear as bathroom tile, and then the wind started.
Casts were off until we hit speed.
Now, rain. It pelted the water and the grass in the meadows bowed and the small, narrow river rose up as if hackled.
Going back, she yelled.
What?
Back! Cold!
She yelled this from over a gravel bar. I saw her rod tip up and the line bound in. Her mouth moved without much sound because of the wind and rain. I had just hooked the first fish.
OK, I yelled back. Fish on!
Even in the mountains, weather has the propensity of a drunk.
Its mood changes with a salvonic frequency.
The rain and the wind which had me wondering why I hadn't packed a chainsaw for trees that might blow down and block the road, stopped without a tap on the shoulder.
I had caught several native cutthroat by then, the kind almost spotless except for back and dorsal fin, and did not notice the change in the weather until the stream arced back into a stand of timber and the sun popped out turning the rocky bottom of the stream a golden umber.
I had just caught a fish and when unhooked, it shot into the grass that hung over a cut bank like the stream pike we used to call snakes as kids.
From there it poked a nose out watching the surface for fat caddis to float by before popping off and climbing into the air like overloaded helos from across a mirror flowing flight deck.

I followed the stream back down, slopping water, fighting the urge to keep fishing. Yellow Hawaiian shorts wet, sweatshirt sleeves soaked to the elbows, feet leaden and cold without much feel, teeth wanting a chatter.
The bowhunters dressed in Filson wool, boots, mitts and covers drinking beer around a campfire espied a wet, red dog, a guy in shorts, fly rod and wading sandals after hours upstream in wind and rain.
Catch anything? They asked, laughlike.
Oh yeah.
Anything nice?
Oh yeah.
Cold up there?
Not so bad. Cold down here?
Oh yeah, they said, but not anymore.

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

Neighbors, faces of North Idaho

2010-09-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

World War II veteran John Meschko in his St. Maries home.

Coeur d'Alene Public Library lower gallery
The photography exhibit "Neighbors, Faces of North Idaho" by local photographer and writer Ralph Bartholdt will be on display through Sept. 30.
702 E. Front Ave. (208-769-2315).

COEUR D'ALENE — Call me Jonesy, the woman said.
She wanted to tell a story about an elk she killed long ago in the high country not far from her home at Carpenter Creek.
Her accent was Appalachia. She had moved to Idaho from the Carolina mountains as a girl, or Virginia, or Kentucky.
Her dad wanted millwork, something that was less readily available in the smoking peckerwood mountains of the Southeast.
She married young, raised a family, worked but hunting was her flair.
Always hunted, she said, bringing her prowess at sneaking in the woods with a rifle to the Idaho hollers.
The six-point bull elk Jonesy killed long ago was the result of a bet. Not a hand-shake bet, but more of a pantomime, a no-woman-kin-do-it sort of pan.
When later she asked the loggers down the way to help her drag her bull, they choked and then went chivalrous, she said.
She would have offered up some meat for their assistance, but they already had a plate of pride to swallow.
Jonesy Woltering is one of the many people I met while working as a writer and photographer in North Idaho.
Frank Werner is another.
Frank is well known for the wooden, duck decoys that he carves with hand tools curling thin peelings that fall to the floor until a block of white pine takes the shape of a fowl.
Frank is a retired Marine who learned about ducks, flat-bottomed boats propelled with a pole and about the decoys that attracted waterfowl to gunners while working at Camp LeJeune.
He had come back from Vietnam to find his new military occupation waiting: Game warden.
It meant confronting the hand-me-down generations of waterfowl hunters in the Carolina estuaries at foggy dawn or black-eye dusk who didn’t have permission to be there.
The confrontations turned tutorial. Soon Werner was learning the pragmatic art of drawing birds to decoys.
Werner has a lot of names for the pretty carvings that land on gallery shelves. Art ducko is one.
His carvings lure real birds, and he shoots them.
Werner’s decoys are pragmatic works of folk art, that he also displays in galleries usually accompanied by the kind of rye humor learned in the muck marshes of the inner banks of Carolina or his 20 years in the Corps.
The people who allowed me to photograph them, and who invited me to their stories are neighbors.
Outwardly they rummage in the run-of-the-mill, they are modest, indifferent, but it’s not true. They all carry something of the extraordinary.
John Meschko is pushing 90 now.
He sits in house on 15th Street with its wood stove and the motorcycle on his porch.
There are memories of more.
He started riding Harley Davidson’s as a scout in World War II and remembers locating a German company in an autumn woodland. By the time he turned tail with a handful of throttle the area, including the road he was on, was being carpeted with bombs.
Meschko was the sergeant at arms in Berlin after the war, then returned to Idaho to attend the university.
His daughter remembers his motorcycles.
One of her first memories recalls riding on the gas tank of Harley through the campus at UI.
He was always on a motorcycle, she said.
These are our neighbors, and part of the fabric of North Idaho.
This exhibit is theirs. It’s for the living and as someone said, the ones who are “no longer fishing.”

Ralph Bartholdt

Desert lake, big wind and Lahontans

2010-08-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

Sign on the side of the store along the highway north of Sparks, Nevada

PYRAMID LAKE — Let them rest, said the lady behind the counter of the small store along the highway.
Outside, a hot wind galloped over the scrub lands that was as many shades of brown as the bellies of the wild horses penned in big corrals up the road.
She watched a soap opera on the screen over the ice chest under a big stuffed Lahontan cutthroat trout that rode the airwaves and the chatter of the air conditioner.
The water gets too warm, she said. So, we let them rest.
Around her, on the low walls butting the ceiling were more of the red-sided cutthroats, their thick bodies in terminal swirl as if catching a current, or turning at the pulse of a leech pattern.
Photographs too. So many, a visitor would have to set present business aside to peruse the fishers taped as it were, timeless, in great checkerboards of grins and fish that seemed to grimace.
On the Polaroids were penned in fading marker the names of the fishers, the date and weight of the cutthroat trophy the men and women pulled from the alkaline lake like hoisting a thin, lead anchor.
We use outriggers, the woman behind the counter said. Spinners too, you know, and people throw woolies with fly rods from shore when they spawn.
I knew some of this, having tried with only small increments of success to catch the ancient salmonids in a handful of lakes like pearls on a broken necklace that hangs north to south from eastern Washington to the sage brushy and obsidian scab of east Oregon and California.
The season opens Oct. 1, she said.
Someone on the television screen yelped and there was a black-haired man and a woman with a long, wavy bustle.
I bought a baseball cap and a sixer of lager. A Paiute with braided hair asked about hot dogs.
None, the lady behind the counter said. Too hot in the summer. No one buys them. I end up throwing them away.
He bought a couple pounders and went out the door.
A man with blond hair in a pony tail, wearing a tie-dye shirt, cutoffs and sandals thanked the woman for letting him air the tires of his camper.
The door of the place opened and closed every time with the hot growl of wind outside that swirled the dust in the driveway.
The woman and her husband ran a guide service for the fish, but the season closed in June.
A slot limit is in effect, the woman said. Anything between 16 and 19 inches is a keeper, and again anything over 24.
Otherwise we throw them back.
Lahontan cutthroats once roamed an ancient lake that subsided leaving pockets of native turf.
Rivers such as the Humboldt, Carson, Walker, Quinn once had them in big numbers.
The fish, bulky and en mass became the the focus of industry. As many as a million pounds annually were harvested and shipped to mining and railroad camps for 40 years starting in the late 1800s until most were gone and the rivers where they flourished soured.
In the Truckee the fish once spawned from Pyramid Lake upstream and Tahoe too had them. Both populations were extinct by mid-century. Dams and rainbow trout introductions were partly at fault. Other foibles followed.
The big fish in Pyramid are Summit Lake stock, smaller than the original behemoths, a reflection of what was here.
Lahontans once ran the Truckee all the way to Tahoe, back in the day, didn't they? I asked the woman, who laughed at the inquiry.
Back in the day, she repeated.
I drove to the lake that emanates like a turquoise medallion from under the surrounding canyon walls.
I cracked a beer and sat on the hood of my rental car by a sign showing a big trout and a native, cui ui sucker, both an important food species once to the Paiute.
The fly rod I used to sling hoppers for browns on the Truckee was untucked in the back seat.
The wind thumped loudly spitting tumbleweeds across the highway.
Below, the big lake seemed calm, like a measured breath.

Ralph Bartholdt

Radon blues and Rugers

2010-08-05T20:55:00.001-07:00

Andy Kee, his .28 and one of his loyal springers

SANDPOINT — At Andy Kee’s crossroads Audubon meets the nuclear age.
Kee is a stately figure in bare feet, a T-shirt and the whiff of higher learning.
He has closely cropped gray hair, a tight, white beard and a tan.
The home where he lives with his wife, Bev, is a wonderfully tangled northern garden of lily, iris, a plethora of plants best described in glossy horticultural magazines with running water, fountains and footbridges.
But his dogs, two Springer spaniels with drooping jowls and a penchant for chickens, betray the real man.
Kee is a grouse hunter by play and a nuclear engineer by degree.
While many may shrug at the seeming juxtaposition of quiet northern woodlands with mushroom clouds over desert sage, Kee, a tall, lean man who likes good guns with grips that meld with his hand, combines the two like the ingredients for Louisiana sweet fish pie served hot with lime and sherbet.
When Kee speaks of his job, there is much talk of isotopes, uranium and plutonium, strontium, cesium, storage containers and half-life.
The talk comes easily to him.
Then he stops and looks from his lawn chair to the mountainous peaks surrounding his home in Sandpoint, Idaho and asks about a ridge.
Up there, he says.
“It’s three and a half miles and a couple thousand feet in elevation.”
It used to be fine grouse hunting, he says.
Not any more.
Kee grew up with his dad in Delaware and Pennsylvania, but his mother and her relatives lived in Sandpoint on the western shore of Lake Pend Oreille and he rode the passenger trains west each summer to stay for a while.
Eventually he came to North Idaho for good, earning an engineering degree from the University of Idaho, a couple hours south at Moscow.
He didn’t learn about grouse until college.
“There were no grouse back East,” Kee says and he means it.
Despite having the ruffed grouse as its state bird, Kee grew up in the open agricultural side of Pennsylvania where ringnecks ruled.
In Idaho, he found his bliss:
Woods, mountains and grouse. A couple different varieties that required a pair of sound legs to find, and maybe a dog.
He chose a Springer spaniel and a .28 gauge to get a closer look at these birds that either thundered from the aspen and fir groves as North Idaho’s ruffed grouse are prone to, or pumped skyward across shrub and krummholz into the mountainous sky, like blue grouse do.
In the 30-plus years since he attended university, Kee’s job has taken him across continents, and he is still with it.
He is still chasing grouse as well.
“It’s tough hunting grouse with a dog,” Kee says. “They tend to run a lot. If you didn’t have a dog, you could kill them with a rock.”
He likes the sport of it.
The short barrel on his .28 gauge over under makes for the best grouse gun, Kee says.
Shells are difficult to find sometimes, so he stocks up.
He learned that the hard way.
“I walked in to the gun shop before season a while back,” Kee says. “I asked for a couple boxes of 28s. The guy looked at me and deadpanned, ‘There are two guys on the West Coast that shoot a 28,’ he said. ‘And you’re the other one.’ ”
Kee, like many sportsmen who grew up on a pair of solid legs and the imagination to take them from valley to valley, has seen his share of changes in the grouse woods.
ATVs carrying indiscriminate hunters, who don’t leave the seat to flush or shoot at a bird, are among the changes he loathes.
“They run up the ridges,” he says. The same ridges it takes him three hours to climb on foot with a dog, pack and his 28.
“The grouse don’t even fly,” he says. “They putt around and shoot ‘em.”
Despite Kee’s animosity toward unearned bounty, Idaho Fish and Game say North Idaho’s grouse are flourishing. The department does not study the birds, but it counts incidental harvest at deer and elk check stations.
“Fall populations of upland birds are mostly dependent upon brood survival,” Phil Cooper of Fish and Game says.
And that is a factor of spring weather, Cooper says.
Cold and wet usually means a drop in chick survival and a population lag.
“IDFG does not do grouse or pheasant population surveys in the Panhandle,” Cooper says. “Therefore the fall hunting forecast for these species is merely intuitive and anecdotal.”
This year’s brood survival rates are anybody’s guess.
Spring weather cycled between spates of sun and torrents of downpours.
Whatever the result, Kee will be out there, whistling for his Springer that bounds up the trail ahead.
Both of them on the hunt for birds.
Not too many. Just a couple.
“It’s a gentleman’s sport,” Kee says. “You’re not putting up a flak pattern to knock birds out of the air. It’s a matter of bringing some home to have a tasty meal for dinner.”

— Ralph Bartholdt

A version of this article first appeared in Northwest Sportsman’s August 2010 edition, on sale now at outlets in North Idaho

The Man from Carter County

2010-07-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

At Miles City with his 1967 Firebird

MILES CITY — I get a lot of comments on it, the man from Carter County, in Montana's Powder River country said.
I think people like it like this.
People liked his 1967 Firebird unglamorized, with old paint, bugs and mud on the fenders, he meant.
He bought it with a blown engine and dropped in a 326 V-8 with a 4-barrel carb that pops out over 275 hp.
He drives it on the dirt roads and streets around Ekalaka, best known for its rattlesnakes, cottonwood trees and argonite.
In that country, when the wind is right, or not at all, you can hear it coming from far off, the Firebird, leaving a dust trail.
When it starts in the morning the neighbors roll over and then half dreaming listen to the engine rev and quit. The starter cranks again and the engine jumps and rumbles. Then come the two pumps on the gas pedal.
One, two, the second is longer than the first and the engine idles. The neighbors in their sleep listen as if it's a soliloquy,
Dressed in Wranglers and Western boots scuffed at the toes, a brush popper shirt and ball cap with the name of an auto parts store, the man from Carter County waits for the RPMs to settle. He sits in the black vinyl bucket seat behind the small steering wheel and slips the Hurst into trot.
The Firebird, regimental red with dust in its wheel wells, glub, glub, glubs down the street that is shaded by high cottonwoods.
At the corner he lets it canter to the edge of town where it strikes a four-beat gait.
He shifts and the neighbors in their sleep hear the engine's steady pace drift off the Miles City Cutoff. They dream of tires thumping over the concrete bridge at Little Beaver Creek as car and driver head into the yellow swales, the outcrops and pink morning.
Sun's first slit in the sky creeps over the barbed wire miles of the Tooke Ranch as the man from Carter County takes the lonely road to the Interstate.
The Firebird downshifts onto Trail Creek and the O'Neill Camp before crossing the Powder River heading West.
Sun in the rear view, the big hoppers click their wings in dry grass.
Wind coming now.
The '67 Firebird gallops past.

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

Vermilion miles away from here

2010-07-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

Casting a jointed floating Rapala from the rock on Echo Point, Lake Vermilion, Minnesota with a view of clouds hovering over the Boundary Waters Canoe Area to the northeast.

SOUDAN — It's July and the sun is a reflector on the dashboard of a car in a parking lot at McKinley Park across the lake to the east of here.
McKinley Park, named after the 25th U.S. president, used to have wooden changing houses with showers and a cement floor that smelled of urine. Sparrows chirped in the open eaves and made shadows on the floor.
The paint outside was sea foam green and peeling. When you walked the path to the houses the rocks pricked your bare feet and small, sharp seeds poked skin.
That was a long time ago and the changing houses are gone.
The park was a staple summer haunt for the families of the miners in the Soudan mine a few miles up the road. At 2,341 feet it is the deepest ore mine in Minnesota and one of the earliest on the state's Iron Range.
It's owner called the surrounding town that was established for the mine, Soudan, a misspelled rendition of The Sudan.
The place was as cold in the winter, he surmised, as The Sudan was hot.
I lived there as a child.
There was one store in town, a gas station and a school. The iron headframe of the mine shaft on the hill above the spires of fir and pine watched over the town like a landlord.
The mine and the school shut down in the mid 1960s, and my dad, the local doc, moved his clinic to a neighboring town, but we kept the lake place which we accessed by a skiff with an outboard. Just as the many retired miners who had similar cottages on Lake Vermilion, we used the 17-foot skiff to motor across the chop, and swales and sometime blue water that was shockingly bright with reflected summer sun.
The trip smelled of gasoline, pine perfume and water.
The water crept up to our toes and spray invariably smacked our faces.
The many cars and pickups in the parking lot this July have the reflectors in the windows to keep the northern Minnesota sun from fading the seat covers and cracking the dashboards.
Their owners live on Lake Vermilion's many islands, travel back and forth in the boats and skiffs they moor at the park.
From this rock where I'm standing in flip flops and shorts, casting a plug for smallmouths or pike, whichever is aggressive enough in the warming waters off the shoals, I can see the Boundary Waters Canoe Area on the other side of Big Bay.
There is Ely Island, named after a miner, and Birch Island, Cherry, Raspberry, Potato and on it goes.
The lake has 365 islands and 1,200 miles of shoreline and stretches more than 40 miles east to west.
From the dock it is an hour of paddling, maybe more, depending on the weather, to the portage that takes you over Pine Island, and then another portage into Trout Lake, which is the Quetico Superior. From there you are a voyageur, singing French-Canadian ballads, as you cut your paddle into the lake and river system of the border country.
I am on the east end of the Lake not far from Stuntz Bay, often pictured in travel brochures, with a fine view, too, of the sunsets that gave the lake its name.
I am casting a plug over the shoals because smallmouths hang on their lee side in the shade where the water is cooler.
Sometimes pike move in prowling for food, scattering the minnows, dashing with a pump or two of their tails through the rock outcrops before settling in the shadows, and then moving on.
When the wind blows east, the pike tend to lie in the current seam that bipasses the bay off this point, called Echo Point.
My dad found it in the early 1960s while fishing for walleye. It had an abandoned homestead and a chimney built on the point's granite outcrop.
He bought it for $8,000 and we settled there despite the lack of roads. We wintered in town, but each summer we moved back out to the cabin that was once the site of a trading company, back in the day when glass beads and gunpowder were worth more than coin.
We had no phone, no car, just a canoe and a stone hearth to heat water.
"Why did you ever leave here?" Someone asked me recently.
"I don't know," I said.
I cast the plug behind a brown globe of gneiss when a smallmouth hit it hard.
I played the fish for a few minutes, remembering what that was like, and brought it in.
It was a 4 1/2 pound bass with red eyes and we ate it over the fire that night.
At dark, with the sparks shooting into the black under the Norway Pine where I have sat since I was a child, I heard the midges swarming. I walked over the hobbly unlit ground as if by feel, into the starlight, to watch the bugs dance over the water like a mega-mosh pit.
In the cabin that night, in the old bed, I heard the loons' call willowing across the bay.
The loons and the waves sloshing the rocks under the bending cedars and birch.
I wanted to wake the kids and say, hear the loons?
But reminded myself that I've done that other summers.
Used to be at night my mother would light kerosene lamps and some Coleman lamps that made the thrushing sound of a toilet that needs its handle jiggled.
On those nights, sometimes, walleye fishers would motor close to shore on the west side of the point and drift their bait off the bottom.
Like my dad did when he found this place.
I told a neighbor who is 60 that no one fishes that spot anymore, or the mudflats where the slate disappears into sand.
"They don't know about it," he said. "You do.
"You grew up here."
Pretty soon, he said, you are going to be an old timer, just like me.
Sometimes I believe I already am.

Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

Hair on the floor, end of an era

2010-06-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

Long-time North Idahoan Bill Fournier gets a clip at Mike's Barbershop on Sandpoint's main street. Owner Mike Winslow calls his customer "Swivelneck," for once craning his neck at a pretty passer-by. "I just wanted to see what kind of Bible she was carrying," Fournier said. "I was a lot younger then."
—Photo by Ralph Bartholdt

SANDPOINT — I'm in Mike's shop and Larry Barton is in the chair and Clarence Davis is waiting for a cut and the rain is on the big window that faces the street and reflects everything like a mirror.
Larry in the chair with the apron around his neck and Clarence on the old sofa sitting under the cougar mount are mirrored in the glass, mixed with traffic and people walking outside.
Above Clarence, just below the cougar that seems to grimace from its perch on the limb of a yellow pine is a black and white picture from back in the day of a doctor and her fishing party with their string of oversize Gerrard rainbow trout.
Cars and trucks rumble past outside. You can feel it in the floor. Then a man wearing a ball cap walks in and says, "How's it going?"
Larry in the chair, and Mike Winslow, whose shop this is, standing with a comb and scissors, talk about the rain and Clarence chimes in that rain is like sex, because it is easy to get behind, but doesn't take long to catch up, when the man with the ball cap nods the greeting.
The door goes bump.
Mike is still clipping, and Clarence's comment is still in the air, when Mike retorts "Old and ugly, how about you?"
The man with the ball cap chuckles and digs in his pockets for a reply and Mike follows up like a right hand behind a jab when the glove is in your face.
"Didn't expect me to tell you the truth, did you?" Winslow says and keeps clipping.
Only on Sunday, I say to myself as I sit in one of the sofas paging a magazine.
And this ain't Sunday.
I've heard this banter repeat itself, but don't lift my nose from the pages of the Field and Stream I'm reading.
In this shop on Sandpoint's main drag where fishing plugs, 100 or more, and fishing spoons, 100 or more, hang from spear gigs, along with photographs from days past in Bonner and Boundary counties, and pike, bass, perch and trout mounts, the men who stop to sit in the two sofas and place their feet on the scraps of carpet that act as rugs, tell history like it was lived.
Oral history.
Not all of them wait for haircuts.
Passers through are treated to the accounts gratis, without knowing.
Sit back, look and listen.
The wooden plugs that were used to troll for the once-plentiful and record size Girard rainbow trout each bear the name of the person brought it to Mike to hang on the wall in the 1960s and 70s.
One of the plugs is large as an unpeeled banana and painted white.
Rick Topp's name is on it.
Whoever carved it did a fine job, Winslow says.
“He thought the bigger the fish, the bigger the plug,” he says.
When he trolled it for Lake Pend Oreille’s rainbows, “It was ripping line off so fast, he had to put both thumbs on the reel to keep it from taking all the line out,” Winslow says.
Bill Garvey’s plug is red and white.
“We could tell Bill Garvey stories all day,” he says.
Clarence pipes up.
“You could even print some of them,” Davis says.
Davis, 79, once a local boxing coach who sent several youngsters to national tournaments has been coming to this shop for a haircut so many years he can't strike up a number.
“I remember when you didn’t have gray hair and a lot of it,” Winslow says.
Davis laughs.
“That must have been a while ago,” he says.
The man with the ball cap asks Mike is it true?
I heard you were selling out.
After 50 years on Sandpoint's main street, Winslow doesn't like to admit it, but quitting is not something he wants to do.
“Anybody want to buy a barbershop?” he asks between clips.
He is not seriously looking for a seller, he adds, in part because anyone buying must have the proper credentials.
“You got to be uglier than me, and cut hair as bad as me,” he says.
Barton remarks that Winslow's tenure is noteworthy.
"They ought to put you on display," he says.
Winslow answers as easily as tossing a card.
“Shows you how long you have to work if you invest in booze and broads instead of stocks and bonds,” he says.
Winslow, who in the summer when he is not golfing on weekends likes to drive an antique T-Bird that someone said was hot pink, is as much a reflection of Sandpoint's past as the faces who come in for clips.
Winslow’s shop is a museum of stories and artifacts from a seemingly lost generation of North Idaho sportsmen and women, as it is a barber shop. The local historical society has asked for some of the relics, but the stories likely will not be passed along. Not as prolifically as they are here, day in and day out, in this room as they have been for more than 40 years — he barbered at Vern's down the street for 9 years in the 1960s — by the people who lived them as the clippers buzzed and the scissors snipped.
“There is a lot of history on that wall,” Winslow says.
This week he is in the process of taking down the barber pole outside.
"That glass is thick," he says.
Once a while back, some kids busted it with a beer bottle.
He had to replace it at a cost of several hundred dollars.
The only solace, he says, "there was a lot of blood mixed with the glass" on the sidewalk.
He'll probably take it home. Maybe sell it.
He has contacted the men and women who dropped off the relics over the years that grace his walls, or their surviving relatives, so they can retrieve them.
Many cannot be returned.
“A lot of good friends aren’t fishing anymore,” he says.
An unusual silence follows.
He keeps clipping.

Ralph Bartholdt

Everywhere you look is the other side

2010-06-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

Train holding morning traffic, North Idaho /Ralph Bartholdt Skookum

ATHOL — Late by 20 minutes.
Nothing that I can't cover for.
It's nothing that won't slip past the front desk, or be unwrapped in my easy slide into the newsroom and my chair, clicking on the computer, unraveling the latest paper, lifting the telephone receiver to my ear in that casual urgency we know as an interview.
I gas it a little to make up time and the rain from the highway is like the loose end of a scarf slapping the fenders.
When I crown the hill the lights far below me a half mile or so are dull.
A string of vehicles winds down the hill in front of me, and then the lights wake red as a bulldog's eyes and begin to blink, the big railroad crossing arms fall like sabers, but slowly as if to defy the coming traffic.
Brake lights blink to a stop as the tail end of the string of Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail cars trundles to a grinding halt across the highway.
I take my place in line.
The rail cars don't move.
The radio makes that static sound as if the windshield wipers connect directly to the speakers and each back and forth motion interrupts the radio's music like a snare drum.
Crickle, crackle.
And again
Again.
A pickup ahead of me pulls from the line, makes a u-turn and heads back up the hill in the direction from which we all came.
Minutes pass.
A car, this one with white fins over the taillights, painfully turns and heads the other direction, the large fuzzy dice that I can see dangling from the rearview inside, swing in the rain and glare from the windshield.
Out there in the downpour a pair of legs move over the rocky rail siding.
I see them under the rail cars on the other side.
A few more minutes and the cars are uncoupled. Part of the train moves north crossing the highway between the crossing arms.
It stops midway.
The wipers swish and the radio, turned down now, crackles with each repetition of the wipers.
I can hear time tick away.
Another car, a blue suburban, turns around and I wonder if there is a route unknown to me, that they will seek out, a cutoff, a round about. I doubt it.
Just back home to coffee and a rain check, I suppose.
I begin to relax.
I sink into the car seat behind the steering wheel.
The sky is whale gray with clouds porpoising slowly in and out of the rain.
The windshield wipers swish and the radio crackles.
The rail cars buckle and inch again like sleepy dinosaurs before stopping. A figure in a blue rain slicker treads arduously over the uneven ground alongside the tracks in the rain, wet gloved hands grab a ladder and the figure climbs aboard.
Another pickup, this one new with a NRA emblem on the back window turns around and drives away.
More than 10 minutes have gone by and my economy car is second in line with no one behind me.
The train lumbers again and stops.
I can feel my heart pump like a bullfrog's bulging body in a pool of lemna and lillies.
I laugh out loud at the dishwater sky, the mist that curls from nooks in the trees, the wet, my lateness and the train.
If morning is electra, this is it.
Synapses calm into a sense of repose with rain's perfume like sticky buds unwinding.
Trains and rain, splashing the hood now. Whales breach in the sky and the man in the blue slicker lights a wet cigarette with a wet match as the tracks are switched and the train heads south leaving part of its load skeleton-like on the siding.
The train's movement is like a history book.
We wait.
The vehicle in front of me and my small car wait for the crossing arms that still taunt in their suffering slowness.
Let them.
When they lift and their lights stop blinking, the radio crackles and I roll down the window and breath the morning.
On the highway, much later, rainwater is the loose end of a scarf slapping the fenders.

Ralph Bartholdt

Ward on the road

2010-05-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

Congressional candidate Vaughn Ward mugs with Sandpoint council member Stephen Snedden.
Photo by Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

SANDPOINT — Vaughn Ward is one of those guys you like.
This is not an endorsement of a candidate, just a confirmation that I believe Ward would make a good squirrel hunter.
Squirrel hunting is an endeavor that requires a handful of skills tossed into a bag, shaken and poured into a bowl like those Caesar salads you get at the neighborhood Harvest Foods.
Marksmanship, vision and good legs to walk a long way are the bulk of the product, along with determination and love of the hunt. A bark call helps.
It’s the seasoning that gets squirrels to stick their heads out of the nest. Or, to scurry onto a limb and chirp with buck-toothed vitriol.
Sit quietly in the solemn woods with your back to the trunk of an oak and your elbows tucked into the soft of your knees. Your hardware store .22 has the leaf sights busted requiring an eye for Kentucky windage.
Plink, plink: Squirrel tails for Mepps as advertised in Outdoor Life at 75 cents a pop and meat for the pan.
It's a good days outing.
It's low budget and reconnects you with the things you've been missing.
When I met Ward on an overcast day in Sandpoint with the blossoms of the ornamental street tree blowing pink on the sidewalk, I monopolized the conversation, in part so he would have little room to say something dumb for the record.
I expected he would, given the newspaper accounts that had him with one boot on the ground and another in his gob.
The endless diatribes of a hapless candidate struck low by his own undoing.
A gaffe for gab.
I was wrong.
He reminded me of the co-captain on my high school football team, the guy with enough talent to steal the show combined with the humility of one who knows better. Or, the pre-med student I used to fight in college as part of the school's kickboxing team; an organized effort that included leather shin guards and 18-ounce gloves.
When you hit someone for three rounds, or he hits you, a relationship is established. For some reason it results in pal-ship, if there is such a thing.
Vaughn Ward emits pal-ship.
I understand that Ward is a candidate for an important political office.
I understand that he might, I am not saying he does this, pound his fist into his palm for affect.
I understand the possibility he flirts with compassion as sort of a Houdini-like straight jacket evasion.
I also believe that he is sincere in this effort, and this sincerity, although it might not win the day, is a-political, which might be Vaughn Ward’s undoing.
I use the squirrel hunt because squirrels are small game.
Ward is a fit candidate to gun for Owyhee sheep, or steep mountain elk, but squirrel hunting goes back to the Ohio River, to grit and necessity.
It requires precision, patience, the quietude of the Big Woods, one shot and the trophy is nothing to brag on yet it is a declaration that, not unlike penmanship, you successfully dealt with the mean tasks on the path to bigger endeavors.
Robert Penn Warren the one-time poet laureate of the U.S. knew the significance of squirrel hunting in his Kentucky woods.
If you hadn’t done it, then you didn’t know its weight, he said. It was more demanding than the baseball that he called silliness.
“He had always called it a fool game, something for children, who hadn’t yet dreamed what a man is, or barked a squirrel, or raised a single dog from a pup.”
I asked Vaughn Ward why he came to Idaho to run for office. This was after all the place he left behind. People think you’re just coming back for an easy mark.
I live here, he replied. I grew up here.
He gave up his Idaho residency for four years because the CIA required it, he said.
Throughout his years in the Marine Corps he registered as an Idahoan, he said.
Those other guys, he said - meaning candidates such as Raul Labrador, who attended Brigham Young University and lives in Star, or the man with the leadership position now, Walt Minnick, considered by most an Idahoan, despite being raised across the border in Washington - they aren’t from here.
As it goes, the statement is true. This is his gig.
He graduated from high school in southern Idaho.
He came from a working class family.
He attended public university here.
He’s a bait fisherman.
This is his show.
And if he doesn’t make the District 1 eastbound train?
“I’ll get a job,” he said. Like everyone else.
Here, in Idaho.
It’s where he’s from.

Ralph Bartholdt

Speed slow, memories yes

2010-05-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

THORNE BAY — Any memories, they asked.
Any photos?
Negative on the photos, I said, but memories? Check.
Speed Seaford died at Harborview the other day.
They unplugged him.
Which, in a way, is apropos. He was never plugged in. Not really. Having spent the brunt of his living in logging camps on Prince of Wales Island where the CB radio ruled, even in the age of cell phones and high def.
Speed's definition of high was wrapped in elevation, and high definition meant the third line under a word in the dictionary.
He was hands on, he knew human nature and he talked slow. Therefor the nickname.
When they pulled the plug a month after he wrecked his four-stroke motorcycle on a strip of highway heading from Thorne Bay to Klawock, his sons and daughters in law, his wife and many nephews, nieces and grandchildren asked if I had any memories to share of Speed Seaford and I said, sure.
After these, there will be more, I said.
When you least expect it, they jump out.
It doesn't end.
I first met Speed in the Harbor Bar, an establishment with a view of a small piece of the shrimp and seine fleet between the shed walls of the canneries in Petersburg, Alaska where herring once flashed for days as they boiled in the ocean with the sun on their scales, and the salmon were so fat you could walk on their backs in the creeks they ran.
Those days were a half-century gone when I met Speed at the round table by the only window in the place, one sunny summer afternoon after spending the day in the woods slinging babbits. He nursed a Miller and asked what do you do?
He's a choker setter, someone said, can't you tell by his fingernails?
Humpff, said Speed, through a gray handlebar mustache. He was never one to waste words.
There were two men talking loudly at the bar, probably fishermen from down south that he wanted to fight, he said, and asked what I thought of that.
I'm game, I replied, and he laughed like a walrus might and hired me for a job later that I still think of a lot.
Speed grew up in Libby, Montana, worked the roads and bridges from there to Bonners Ferry, married into a large family of railroaders, boxers and baseball players and took his bride north to a place called Coffman Cove at the edge of Clarence Straight where he put his education to work building roads.
Prince of Wales Island was considered the largest logging enterprise in the world and Coffman was camp, a jumping off and getting on point where loggers in Filson tin pants, suspenders over striped rigging shirts, Romeos and snoose comprised the Sunday uniform. Any other day the Romeos were traded for caulk boots, and tin hats replaced baseball caps.
The whole archipelago was a neighborhood, and so I found Speed at the Harbor Bar 60 air miles north of Coffman. Or, maybe he found me.
I followed him to construction jobs in places like Nome and Trocadero Bay where, in winter the whales breached in the waves ahead of the work boat with its windows frozen with spray.
Once, in a place called Calder Bay, not far from the creek where logging-songster Buzz Martin was killed, Speed was in a backhoe churning up rock for a load as I and a fellow truck driver waited in the rain.
I stood by the cab with the Kenworth diesel chugging while Red sat on the ground behind his truck with a wrench trying to fix a brake.
Speed swung the working end of the back hoe around and called me over.
He leaned out of the cab as I scrambled up the rocks.
Tell Red, he said, that if he tries taking off the top of that air can, the spring will come loose and take his head clean off.
He went back to work.
Red, the other driver who was turning the bolt to release the can top, stopped when I said it, filed the wrench in his pocket and retired to the cab of his truck.
I have friends I tell these stories to and they won't have it.
Once, in Alaska, they say, and laugh because they have heard a few of them before.
They have their own lives and their own stories to hitch.
If there is just one, though. Just one I am allowed to relay and take with, it's this.
In Nome where we hired on to build the Nome to Council highway cutting through tundra beyond the Safety Roadhouse of Iditarod fame, and over the Solomon River where on a knoll overlooking the Bering Sea the graves of Eskimos mix with miners and Chinese workers, a young Cat skinner once belly ached about the asininity of truck drivers.
We sat in the Polar Bar over beers and he aped on the ilk of the men behind the wheel of the big Terex trucks, their unsustainable density and plain stupidity.
Speed, cradling the inevitable Miller looked at the boy and said quietly, son, there is not a day on this earth when you can't learn something from the lowliest truck driver.
I wanted for a while to tattoo that on my chest.
I didn't need to.
I keep it now with my memories of Speed.
The ones that come easy.
They all do, just at different times and some more frequently than others.
And when they come, they are thick, like honey or 90-weight, highly viscous, just like his voice.
Straight.
And slow.

Ralph Bartholdt

The vine inspiration

2010-05-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

Photo by Ralph Bartholdt/Skookum

SANDPOINT — She says vineyards.
Looking around, you think, indeed.
Maple is porous, she says.
Like the old masters, she sometimes uses wood instead of canvas.
She mixes colors as she paints, shunning the pallet.
They are more vibrant, she says.
You have come off the street where the sky considers rain or sleet, maybe snow. Your footfalls on the stairs make noise like an old tenement. You might turn around except for the horses.
They are thick and framed with instinct and strokes of oil paint at the top of the stairs, inviting you to get up.
The building is old wood and brick. Shinola, tar paper and neatsfoot.
The man who sells remedies to what he considers an ephemeral existence steps from an office with an open door to shake hands. He presses a brochure into your palm.
Not interested you tell him kindly. He points down the hall where sunlight falls from a room, or a light bulb's steady throw.
It is neither, you later learn standing with the paintings and their flaming color that is stamen and pistil, like orange peel and the boiled shell of a king crab, like husks burned umber and the crisp seeds of pomegranate.
Lisa VanDerKarr is behind an easel surrounded by her art with her back to the windows in the corner room.
When I first leased this space, she says, I didn't know how I would pay my rent.
A commissioned piece is at her feet, unfinished.
Procrastination.
She is concerned with the work at hand, a flaming depiction of a lake through the hanging vines of trees as bright as a popsicle. A mainsail pitches in the wind, palatable and exuberant.
You don't like this painting, do you? She asks, catching you off guard with her frankness.
VandDerKarr was supposed to be a winemaker, an heir in the alchemy of the family vineyard.
When she saw Monet as a child she changed course, taking root in the same earth but with a brush of animal hair instead of the certificate of viticulture.
When she asks questions the answers are visually deciphered.
Professors from southern California come to her Sandpoint studio to learn what she taught herself.
The masters were her teachers, she adopted their techniques and the business model of Theo, Van Gogh's brother.
"That's what I did," she says.
She tried other jobs, but always the colors called her back and her paintings found an audience.
They grace the walls of galleries, magazine covers and private studios. She doesn't show or travel to fairs.
"No contests, no competitions," she says.
She doesn't mingle, read the papers or glaze over in front of the television.
"Exactly what you're not supposed to do, I did," she says.
It works for her.
"All I really do, is sell paintings, so I can paint," she says.

Time, toils and Tollbom

2010-04-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

Ward Tollbom in his Hen's Tooth Gallery at 323 N. First Ave. Sandpoint
Photo by Ralph Bartholdt

SANDPOINT — Ward Tollbom has painted an owl.
It is a small owl and the watercolor seeps around the perimeters of the painting.
He says come look, and so I do.
He says it because he has not matted my prints.
It has been weeks.
When I walk into his frame shop on Sandpoint’s First Avenue next to Dann Hall’s studio of exquisite black and whites and the color photo Dann shot at the Vancouver Games of the guy with the Go Canada! shirt zipping his pants in the Port-a-Potty complex, Ward says hey.
He says, they are not finished.
It’s amazing how busy I am, he says.
Ward is 60, but looks like a guy in middle age who has spent a lot of time eating fish.
He has that Norwegian glow, like he dreams sea air and eats sea air and doesn’t care too much about the oil rigs dotting the North Atlantic.
He says, come look, so I do.
It could be a screech owl, or a barred owl or a burrowing owl.
It is meticulously depicted, almost photographic.
I don’t ask which, because both Ward and I have biology in us, the study of natural things, and I should know the species.
He attended the University of Idaho dangling the idea of a science major, but instead turned artist.
I got a degree in wild animal science, but followed a chainsaw to Alaska, before turning to journalism to earn the bread I want to butter.
When he was in Moscow, those many years ago, he longed for the lake and mountains, so painted them.
“It’s pretty dreary down there,” he says. “Especially in winter. All brown and gray.”
One of the first things he painted after learning perspective and how to pen a field of wheat, was City Beach.
He did it from memory.
And the barns along the river.
And the mountains where he and his father chased deer.
His dad was a one-legged grocer. Raised a family that way.
His wooden leg hangs from the wall in Ward’s shop next to the pictures of deer and moose that he and his family killed and ate, and the antler mounts.
When Ward has a lousy day he looks at the leg, the leather straps, the pain of it, he says, and remembers.
"He did it on one leg," he says. "I can do it on two."
There’s a lure, too, still packaged, hanging from a nail on a post.
It is large, metallic and treble hooked.
It is a version of the lure he used to catch the many mackinaws that he and Boots Reynolds hoisted into their boat one day a while back.
They made more than a hundred bucks apiece on bounty.
“Better than going to work,” Ward said. “Those days are gone, I think.”
In its effort to kill the predators of kokanee, Idaho Fish and Game placed a bounty on lake trout, paid commercial fishers to harvest them and generally waged an all-out war on the deep water species.
It will bring the bluebacks back, they surmised, but some anglers think the plan is idiotic.
Ward wants to catch a big Kamloops rainbow again. The kind that catapults into the air and wraps the line around the outboard and generally whoops it up.
Mackinaws he says, “run deep a few times and shake their head,” before you reel them in. They don’t provide the excitement of a 20-pound Gerard kamloop.
“Lookit this,” he says, and I admire it.
It is the painting of the owl.
The bird is small, slate gray and barred. Its feathers are almost tactile. The individual hairs move in the air of your breath.
Its eyes look into yours.
A sharp beak. The landscape around the bird is silent.
I hold the picture as if it is the owl itself.
I don’t ask what kind because it would betray the distance I have laid between my past.
A decade ago, I would have said its name, but now I no longer have it.
“That’s beautiful,” I say, instead.
Ward is happy.
He doesn’t get to paint often anymore.
“It’s amazing how busy I am,” he says.
I’ll be back, I tell him. No hurry.

Ralph Bartholdt

Melvin and his electric motor (Earth Day, Spirit Lake, Idaho)

2010-04-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

SPIRIT LAKE — Melvin is a tricycle ninja.
Pass him at the Post Office and by the time you pull up to the pumps three blocks away, exit your car, lift the cap and insert a card for the inevitable $40 debit, he's on his third lap around you like a porpoise in a silent sea, quietly getting closer.
The tricycle he rides is sweatless.
Park yourself on the thick, Schwinn seat, twist the throttle and the front wheel engages.
"I had this made in China," he says.
The motor is in the front fork and wheel assembly.
The back two wheels aren't powered.
"They just keep your butt from dragging on the ground," he says.
He invented the electromagnetic motor and hopes to market the idea in the land of Uncle Sam.
It's charged by 4 lunchbox-size batteries that don't smell or make noise and it cruises at 40 mph.
"I can go to Post Falls and back in two hours and it will cost me all of about a quarter," he says.
Melvin lives in Spirit lake. An ex-logger, ex-contractor, ex-construction guy. At 58, he resides in what the kids here call the old folks place: A band of single level apartments by the elementary school that get snow loaded in bad winters, and stay cool in July.
He broke his back a while ago and survived a major illness.
When his cards turned up, he began tinkering with the idea of a vehicle that costs little to operate, but can travel a great distance on a pittance.
His brother is married to a Chinese girl, he says.
She helped him find a company overseas to make the motors that he attaches to old bicycle frames, or better, three-wheelers.
It's being used in China, he says. Right now. As we speak.
And here too, in the land of limited vision.
He tried getting the motor manufactured in the U.S.A. but ran aground: Too many regulations, too little creativity, and the myopia.
"It's like dealing with a band of blind troglodytes," Melvin says.
His hair is white like a Nike logo, He wears black slip-ons, tube socks and sweats. His shirt pocket needs an engineer's pen.
From behind wide-framed glasses he is Albert Einstein without the sweater, but with a similar mode of transportation.
A modern version. Down-scaled. The same intent.
A while back he approached a Spirit Lake landmark. The pile of old bicycle frames in an overgrown city lot alongside New Hampshire Street made a mound four feet high and 12-feet in diameter. The metal mound was shaded by a lilac bush and bumped against a failing elm.
It was the remnants of a bicycle repair business on the same block as a Western-style facade, two-story apartment building that is in danger of drawing attention by a Hollywood production crew, or Tom Waits.
He approached the man who owned the bicycle hill and paid him $10 to pull whatever frames he wanted from the heap.
"This town needs a bicycle shop," he says.
That's in the future. For the time being he will make another electric model from bike frames he has welded.
His three-wheeler is entered in the town's Earth Day celebration.
"I'll win, hands down," he says. "No one has anything like this."
The flat black prototype he rides is bare bones, he says. But it's a lot faster than previous renditions.
"It's like a Lamborghini," he says. "But, I don't need to push the gas pedal all the way to the floor."

Leon Atkinson and the Indie gypsies

2010-04-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

SANDPOINT — He comes into the office midday.
It is a rainy spring of flat light and umbrellas.
He is disheveled wearing mud boots, an open jacket and stocking cap. His right eye waters and he walks slowly like a man who spent a night on a bus.
He wants an article, he says and tells me why.
I study him for a moment.
"You don't know who I am," he says, looking at me through the one eye that isn't blinking and watering.
Leon Atkinson is a classical guitarist of some renown.
He teaches guitar at universities and has a Public Radio show.
Today, to the uninitiated, he looks like a man with a taste for the blues.
The walking blues, the I-know-you-know-the-blues, blues.
He is accustomed to the misperception, he says.
It's not that he is abject to jazz or blues music. He prefers a different genre.
He is about Andres Segovia and talks about Baroque sound and adaptations of Renaissance six-string, not Flamenco.
Segovia, it is said, grew on flamenco and diversified his style to more moving lyrical reflections.
The Spanish master, according to popular edict, once said that he "rescued the guitar from the flamenco gypsies."
Atkinson recalls Segovia and plays, among others, a '37 Hauser guitar. It is a replica of the instrument Segovia used.
He knew Segovia.
“When he walked into the room, even if you didn’t see him, you knew he was there,” Atkinson says.
I call him the next morning and he asks why I don’t want to use the press photograph that ran in a local magazine.
“It’s too pretty,” I say, and he laughs.
He knows what I mean.
In some ways he has cultivated unpretty.
Away from university classrooms and the crisp snap of sheet music he has made himself into sort of a North Idaho character who flies in the face of faculty. The music halls and quiet stages where soft light falls with a sound not unlike centuries passing are his offices.
But, he doesn't live there.
The history of the world is in the floating dust where music plays a fluid narrative.
He lives here.
I meet Atkinson in a downtown coffee house and we take some photos. He strings a guitar made by a local luthier.
Oh, the sound, he says.
We go outside and he sits on a rock and plays.
A drizzle specks the air.
His music and Atkinson himself are juxtaposed in a setting of honky tonk rail lines and chainsaw shop turned upscale bakery homogenations.
He plays a classical warm up and tightens his guitar strings.
He squints through his unwatering eye and plays. He is rescuing the guitar from the Indie gypsies.

Leon Atkinson will play Saturday at Ivano’s in Sandpoint starting at 6 p.m. Cost is $40 and includes dinner.

Ralph Bartholdt

A place to come (to up-end your line)

2010-03-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

Don't look back. Keep going straight to the first bend. There's a gate there. Make sure to close it.

Rubber pants, undergarments long on warmth and the dirt of Silver Spur Road, Montana

Rigging up in the alluvial trench of southwestern Montana on a moderate winter day

Next hole, not far from where the Ruby, Jefferson, Beaverhead and Bighole rivers mingle

Pointers, Ruby, cut bank, San Juan worm, indicator, Tobacco Roots, Ruby Range. What else?

Boy, man, dog watching the bubble line on the Ruby River in late winter

The woman and her son beneath the Tobacco Root Mountains south of Twin Bridges, Montana

A Ruby River brown trout, somewhere near Sheridan, Montana, the angler and his pal

Shop talk (cuttin' the mop)

2010-03-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

Jim Aiken of The Pend Oreille Barbershop snips Don Childress' top as the men contemplate fishing. Photo by RALPH BARTHOLDT/SKOOKUM

Not too long ago, this town was named as one of the Rocky Mountain West's best fly fishing towns.
There is a problem with this distinction illustrated by the reaction uttered by the fly fishers who live here:
"Huh?"
Barbershops are a good place to feel the pulse of old people.
To get to know how they think.
Especially when it comes to things sporting fins or feathers.
It's men mostly. Not just old men, but men who get haircuts at the hands of other men.
That excludes a big portion of the populace, but the snip of the scissors, the falling of the last remaining, and sometimes well tended gray strands, is conducive to the kind of humor that a coiffure in these conditions evokes.
"It's not gonna look a lot different when I get done with it," Jim Aiken, the one-eyed owner of The Pend Oreille Barbershop in Sandpoint says to the slim, 60ish man with the plastic apron around his neck.
That's Don Childress.
He has been all over the continent, and off-continent hunting trout with a fly rod.
But he is determined that his hair needs trimming.
Maybe it is because of the days he recently spent on the Grand Ronde catching steelhead.
A few days on the river wearing stocking or ball caps gives your head a feeling of having hid alone in a footlocker, offset only by lifting the cap and running hands, often slime scented, through crew cuts or pompadours and a barbershop sign on the way home, or after you get there, often elicits a kind of run that has you in the door, settling into a cracked-leather, horse hair filled seat cushion anticipating shedding something that isn't skin.
We are fishers after all, not reptiles.
"The only problem," Childress says regarding the Best of the West distinction, "is there aren't any good rivers within 100 miles of here."
Then the men name off local rivers that hold fish, but only in the spring — sometimes the very early spring — when a couple species of trout migrate upriver to spawn.
Lightning Creek, the Pack River has been compromised, they say, Grouse Creek too, Sand Creek has cutthroat in the spring, but access is a problem, although it has bass spawning sometimes into July because the water is so cold.
The talk turns to the Clearwater, North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene and the St. Joe.
"Driftboats on the Joe?" One of the men says quizzically.
"It's coming to that," the other says.
Less than 2 blocks away on Sandpoint's main drag a different crew discusses a different topic.
In Mike's Barbershop the topic is politics despite the unadulterated hobglob of elk and deer photos, fish pictures, antlers and assorted paraphernalia collected by someone, or many people, who seem to have hooks and bullets on their mind much of the time.
"People bring me those," Mike, the owner said.
When someone walks through the door and asks, 'How's it going?' Mike, a tall, lean man with glasses, graying hair and a concerted look on his face that can't decide between class clown, or city council member, invariably answers "Old and ugly. How 'bout you?"
The newcomer sits down and says, same here, and after a short pause in which scissors go clip clip on a head of hair, Mike turns to the newcomer and says "You weren't expecting me to tell the truth, were you?"
The new guy says he came for a little truth, and the man in the barber chair says, wrong day, you should come back Sunday.
"That's when we're closed," Mike grins and the scissors clip clip.
On this day in what seems like spring, and a good day to contemplate fishing in a place strung with lake plugs and metal spoons, the men are in no mood for fish talk.
They mention something they call the socialization of America, and it has nothing to do, even, with a put-and-take fishery, or introduction efforts of Golden trout.
Sporting goods stores are sort of like barbershops in that you are likely to hear many of the same phrases in both.
"Crappies like yellow," and "Bright lures on bright days," are examples.
Across town, at Sandpoint Outfitters, owner Tom Anderson laughs at the Best of the West distinction.
He repeats what others have said: Not much sustainable flyfishing for miles around, although a few streams — Cocolalla Creek for one — have been known to produce some big trout on occasion.
And bass too.
"I heard they blew the beaver dams out of there," he says.
Which would cool the water and make it more suitable for salmonids.
The talk turns to moose, wolves, and the latest calf to cow elk ratios — boosted by what Idaho Fish and Game has referred to as the mildest winter on record (after two of the most severe).
"We better get some rain," Anderson says.
Without it, browse and the animals it supports, as well as streams and the fish in them will take a hit.
At Jim Aikens shop, after brushing the snippets of hair from the plastic apron around Don Childress' neck and shoulders and putting a few bills into the till, Aikens says, next.
It's Steve Mackay's turn.
He has been sitting quietly in a chair under a set of deer antlers next to the window where a neon sign says "Haircuts," carefully turning the pages of a newspaper.
He folds the paper, gets up and moves across the room to the empty barber chair.
He moves methodically. The bags under his eyes seem to smile.
He has listened to the conversations.
It is his turn in the spotlight and he knows it will disclose his otherness.
He doesn't care.
"I don't hunt or fish," he says.
Warm afternoon sunlight falls through the window.
He settles himself comfortably into the chair.

Ralph Bartholdt

In the zone: Planning for rivers

2010-03-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

Photo by RALPH BARTHOLDT/SKOOKUM FOTO

The maps on his wall are not related to his job as the city's planner.
Jeremy Grimm was a professional fly angler before he joined the circus of civil action and discontent.
He will deny the latter, despite the dreams he has sometimes, I am certain, of rainbow trout breaching the Bighorn River before it heads too far north to its meeting with the Yellowstone and, later, the Missouri.
Sometimes, maybe Sunday, I imagine he sits quietly in a pew with his wife and young son and the same tie he brings to work. He recalls the few-mile strip of North Platte below the dam where a road runs ragged and bruised through the desert in a place whose one salient feature, John Gierach said, is "there is no one there."
Most of the people in Carbon County, Wyoming are smart enough not to venture out into this scrub country of sage, sparse grass and "tough little shrubs like cedar rim thistle and bladder pod."
The plants, what there is of them, all hang on in bad dirt, as another writer, Annie Proulx, said.
But there is a piece of river here, where the trout rise violently to the fly and when netted their tails flop sky, because the river net you hauled to the place on an elastic string clamped to your back isn't big enough.
Grimm, a middle size man in his 30s with rectangular, plastic-rimmed spectacles, a family, and river prints on his office wall at city hall, speaks deftly and articulately of zoning regulations, amendments. Of what could be a pending lawsuit.
He talks of architectural consistency and movement, the aesthetic interaction between pedestrians and the brick facades of the new business district that he and others envision for this northern town.
Then he steps from behind his desk and walks to the big maps with his patent leather shoes going swish.
The maps on his wall are the closest thing to life size pictures of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
We are trumped by them.
We are maggots stuffed into the lower lip of these magnanimous geological likenesses.
But, they are just maps.
This is the place I was talking of, he says.
His index finger follows the North Fork of the Clearwater River from Dworshak east. As his finger moves, it conjures valleys thick with fir and cedar, the smell of rain on berry bushes, wait-a-minute vines, skunk cabbage growing in the slosh of shade and devils club pricking shins before you draw on your waders.
"All day," he says. "Twenty-three-inch cutthroats."
I nod.
I know this section of river.
And am burdened with the journalistic curse for reality and cynicism that knocks five inches off of any fish tale.
Grimm was a fly fishing guide before he earned a master's degree in community planning and development from the Muskie School of Public Service in Portland, Maine.
He walks to the big maps wearing the shoes that swish and points to the North Platte, the Bighorn, a dot representing the small town in Wyoming where he lived.
I ask about Island Park and he says he has been past it, but without stopping.
The rainbows there, he has heard, are so wily, they won't give an angler a second chance.
Once you spook them with a misplaced fly, he says, they are gone.
I put my notebook down.
It's fish talk and this makes me happy.
I probably won't shed a line on the Henry's Fork around Island Park. It reminds me of another putatively stellar fishery in Washington state I won't visit again because the water is more stagnant than a tadpole estuary.
"I have never fished in Washington," Grimm says.
It's pleasant to hear that, considering my luck there.
And it is agreeable to note that this city hall, with its two stories and many offices, has at least two fly anglers with framed pictures of fish, and long, slender poles, sun and rubber pants on their desks.
Fly fishing is a far cast from golf, although at times it whiffs of clubhouse.
That is unnerving, in a way, given that the people with whom I usually chase trout are more prone to Pabst, pasties and pub food than pomp.
But, it's good, nonetheless to know that someone on your beat, your sources so to speak, mumble at times and possibly in their sleep syllables of the same language, that includes sunlight and water, taut lines, blood knots, brown trout and beer.
And rivers.
Most importantly, that.
Words, interviews the genuflection to language can become bureauspeak or journajargon, devoid of commonality.
Until a 9-foot, 5 weight is mentioned, and a handful of dry flies.
Blue winged olives, parachute Adams, elk hair caddis.
That's when we stand naked except for a fly vest and a bleached baseball cap, maybe a pair of Polaroid sunglasses.
A pair of Crocs.
Lips snoose spittled.
Naked and looking into a riffle where sunlight dances like fibered glass.

...
With the high water of the last couple years, the St. Joe River of northern Idaho, Grimm says, "has been crazy."

...
Don't I know it, I say.
I fished it pensively and methodically throughout that period.
"Crazy," I repeat after him.
"But, the fishing kicked ass."

Ralph Bartholdt

Shaps and woolies: A winter day on the Ruby

2010-03-10T22:21:00.000-08:00

Photo by RALPH BARTHOLDT/SKOOKUM PHOTOGRAPHY

SHERIDAN — The elk antlers on the ceiling at the Wise River Club were 26 years in the making.
The bull elk that dropped the antlers each spring lived in a corral across the highway many years ago.
"They kept him in the paddock over there," said the bartender, a large man with a red face, brogue and hair the color of clouds.
He pointed through the window over Hwy 43 a few miles up from the Troutfitters guide service.
The stove on the ground floor of the club — WRC for short, with a logo that resembles a smoking iron and the bare, burned skin of a Hereford — emanated a warmth worth standing near.
Several patrons did this.
The cook also.
The bar tender stayed behind the varnished, wood-topped bar that angled from one wall to another with a gap in between where a hall connected tavern and cafe.
There were rooms upstairs.
The tavern's low ceiling kept the stove's heat from escaping.
The elk antlers clawed the wooden ceiling like a stampede of arthropods, gray and multi-tined.
I stood with my neck craned counting points.
"They start down there," the barkeep said.
The first sheds were skinny, bent canes of bone.
The year after, they had grown forks like a hay pitch.
Another year and they were officially rag horns three points here, five points there.
And so it went, across the ceiling.
The farther away from the front window, the bigger the beams and the lower the light.
It was one of those mornings when you think about home with a certain nostalgia as if the jukebox bumped a song by Chicago that you remember from a childhood car ride with your father that led nowhere in particular except maybe into your subconscious.
"Can I get you anything else?" the man with the apron said, his accent melding with the ageless motor of America, as the sun lay like paint on the pavement outside.
"I'm good, brother," I said, and thanked the lot of them for their gabble and good natured camaraderie on this Sunday, in spring, in Montana.
The door bumped behind us.
Outside the grass was yellow and the snow was limited to the mountains.
Not a good thing for this part of the state so reliant on tourism, anglers in July and snow cats in winter.
"They are going to close the Bighole this summer," the cook said with a certain dread like bald tires on an old car with miles flat and far off ahead.
We had fished for two days with some luck.
The trip was a last minute fracas of packed bags, gasoline and road food.
We stopped at the Stone Fly Shop in Butte for some rudimentary bugs and beads we already had in our fly boxes buried under blue jeans and wading boots.
Mike Marcum, one of the store's owners, was sincere when he rang up the order and said, "Thanks, man."
Times are tough. The only thing consistently good is the fishing.
He was heading to Salmon, Idaho where steelhead were being sacked by the dozens.
A five-hour drive to Nirvana, he called it.
We got coffee at the Conoco, a ritual that goes back several years and is as difficult to decompose as cellophane.
Then we drove.
Early morning light.
Mountain passes.
Semis.
Spring.
Country opening up like a palm.
The draws and wrinkles of it, the life lines and antelope in a field of stubble.
We stopped as trucks blew past and pulled out the binoculars for a closer look.
One buck.
The herd came toward us in the curious fashion of things dependent on wildlife managers for their survival.
We passed through the small towns whose names are on the tongues of tourists come summer, but only mentioned in the off season by chambers of commerce seeking a supplemental plan, and council members who want to boost business when fly anglers are back home with their nose in mail order catalogs and toes in fleece slippers.
We turned at the school and headed through a residential area where a woman in a pile coat washed a pickup with a garden hose. She waved.
We returned the gesture and hobbled over a cattle guard and down a long road shouldered by red dogwood brush and slender cottonwoods.
Three and a half miles.
Where the stream edged the road we stopped and pulled on long underwear and waders. We strung line, and popped the caps off of long neck bottles with logos that included snow capped mountains.
Very similar to what surrounded us.
We spliced line and tied nymphs to red worm imitations.
I saw a bugger with rubber legs.
Split shots.
Someone said chironomid.
We made like we had planned this all along although it was better than we had anticipated.
The Ruby River is a brush-ridged confluence of bends and hitches, like a snarl.
The water is dark blue most of the time.
Tail waters aren't subject to the blathering and cocky moods of melt and runoff, the raging egos of winter weather.
The Ruby and the land around her is a slow symphony heard from a distance, an old farmhouse near, a record player. There are scratches in the LP, some silence between tracks, but mostly when you are cognizant of the sound, it is music and riffles and some snags.
We lost bead heads and a streamer.
After a while we found a hole that gave up several brown trout.
They weren't large, but their brightness at first was like foil, so silver and sunlit. Then the color set in, the buttery yellow of their bellies and tails.
We hiked for a long time, catching holes, arms pumping with the deft rhythm of cast teasing cacophony.
Whitefish sipped the beadhead nymphs at dusk.
One, two, three, four, so kind and helpful lending their own fight to the day, with characteristic native unselfishness.
Somewhere on the way back we stopped at a roadside history placard.
Lewis and Clark's men had swollen feet here, it said. So bruised and swollen from humping up the rivers that they could not go on.
Probably just an excuse to fish, someone said, as a beer cap went plink and made a run down the angled pavement toward the embankment that dropped dark and away from the probe of headlights.
Back there in Sheridan where we stopped for supper an hour earlier, someone talked about a horse.
I overheard it.
Five kids on that horse and when she ran one of us always slid off the back.
Broom tail, he said.
A leg up.
We wore shaps he said, enunciating the "sh" like shoo fly, instead of the Ralph Lauren way.
They were woolies, he said. Fleece turned inside for extra protection and warmth.
Woolies.
Warmth.
Like a winter day on the Ruby.

Ralph Bartholdt

Gun n' Horn

2010-03-04T23:26:00.000-08:00

Bonner County Gun and Horn Show, March 5-7, Sandpoint, Idaho

Taj Hull, of Sandpoint, unwraps a mule deer head mount that will be displayed at the Sandpoint Archers booth at the Bonner County Gun and Horn Show that starts Friday at noon at the Bonner County fairgrounds in Sandpoint. The show runs through Sunday.

Hull's head mount won the best of show at the 2007 Bonner County Gun and Horn Show.

Hull killed the deer up the Pack River during the rifle season, he said.

Sponsored by the Bonner County Sportsmen, this year's show contains lots of exhibits and information booths, memorabilia, hunting supplies and demonstrations as well as lessons for kids. Call 208-263-5347 for more information.

Northern fish from no-name bay

2010-03-02T20:22:00.000-08:00

They came into the newspaper office to show off their prize.

It was in the back of a pickup wrapped in a blanket.

The fish, a northern pike with some fresh scrapes on its mouth, pumped its lower jaw showing a fortress of teeth.

The man who caught it adjusted his glasses. He pulled at his hat and jogged the canvas coat that piled over him like a horse blanket.

He hoisted the fish and said hurry up.

He meant with the camera.

I pointed it, and said, I don't think so.

The fish was 45 inches long and weighed 30 pounds, he said.
To get a good picture I told him sideways.

Stand sideways.

He didn't know what I meant, so I pulled him into position.

Hurry, he said, it's heavy.

The sky was the zinc that falls on things in the very early part of spring in North Idaho.

It is metallic, gray, flat and cool, but without an atomic number.

Vehicles rolled up to the man and his friend who didn't give a name.

Jack, his friend said.

As in Jack fish.

Pickerel, he said.

As in pike.

OK, I said, as in whatever you say, pal.

The people in the vehicles stopped in the street and asked where'd you get 'im?

A lake around here, the men said coyly as if...

As if another angler with a rod fishing the openings where the ice used to be was going to intrude on their 75 miles of shoreline.

How'd you catch it? someone asked.

Smelt, the man holding the fish said.

Smelt on a tip up, the other man added like a red herring.

He grabbed the fish by the tail so the angler in the canvas coat could breath a little.

Coy, these boys were, and how. Regular clams.

The only ice was on some local lakes that didn't hold pike and, for that matter, anglers.

When the zinc sky of spring lies flat on pocket-knife carved picnic tables, and the air bites with the whiff of melting snow crackling, or the memory of snow, a lot of anglers get a jump on pike by casting to the ice-out edges of lakes such as Hayden and Coeur d'Alene.

They use dead things like smelt or herring, stuck with a hook and settled near the bottom. Pike cruise the old weed lines looking for food, and dead stuff is good eats.

It's what they dig their maws into.

Jeff Smith of Fins and Feathers has seen a lot of anglers gearing up for spring bait fishing for northerns.

"I have heard of some good catches from the south end of the lake in the Harlow Point area and Harrison Bay," Smith said. "On the north end try Wolf Lodge, Blue Creek and Squaw bays, and then Cougar when the water comes up a bit."

In Sandpoint, on that dented, milsch-can day recently, the man who held the fish said, are we good?

I dunno, I said. A couple more. And I snapped some.

The man who called himself Jack pike smirked, and people from the sidewalk came over for a look asking what kind of fish is that?

A question, I surmised, that would not have been asked, pardon me this assumption:

It was a question that would not have fallen from the lips of anyone old enough to pay cash for a candy bar back in the day, when Sandpoint smelled of mill chips and smoke, and log trucks rolled into town with drivers pulling the swish of their parking brake toggles on side streets, not far from the Tam - a local tavern - and most kids and grownups had enough zoology learned in the slough or the Pastime to distinguish a pike from a herring.

Is one generation better than the other? I don't know.

Wow, that's a big fish, a woman in a light jacket and her hair high with pins said.

The man with the glasses lay the fish back into the bed of the pickup. He had his picture in the pages of the local newspaper on another occasion for a big rainbow he caught years ago, he said.

When will this be in the paper?

Maybe tomorrow, I said. Or, maybe next week.

This fish is going on my wall, he said. On my wall.

Ralph Bartholdt

Jack fish

2010-01-28T14:30:00.000-08:00

It’s seven feet deep here, 200 feet from shore, but Tom’s been walking on water.

The hard kind.

He has fished this lake since he was a kid and he knows it doesn’t require a halo to walk out here now, drill a few holes, drop some line and sit on a bucket.

“There’s some slushy stuff on top, but down there is the clear ice,” he says.

The good stuff.

“This is the best ice I’ve seen in years,” he says.

It froze early and didn’t go away. Usually, a lot of these chain lakes get ice after the new year, have enough ice to hold an angler for a few weeks and then insulating snow, warm weather, or both, makes the ice weak or disappear.

“I wouldn’t be out here if it was snow ice,” he says.

This ice got thick enough to fish the first week of December, almost 2 months ago. The anglers sniffed it out and the word spread to the usual crowd. The guys who heard about it on the CB told it to Joe Peak at the Snake Pit and Rick at the Valley Fishing Hole in Smelterville, both of whom already knew.

In Coeur d’Alene on Sherman, Jeff Smith mentioned it to a Coeur d’Alene Press editor who wrote about it in the weekly fishing report.

He mentioned the 30 pike that someone caught in a day and soon the lake down the road was spotted with anglers, some of them so far out on the frying pan reflection of sky and frozen water that they looked like pepper specks on stainless steel.

The pickups were parked at the turnout across the highway from the road that leads to Tom’s house back there in the valley at Willow Creek.

That’s where he grew up and has lived for 50-some years. He raised a family there and lives with his wife Kriste in the same house with the same floor where he kicked his boots off as a kid, and hung his first set of elk horns.

He and his three poles with line dropping into three holes were on the ice last night when I drove past. I stopped to take a picture of the sunset and him out there by himself away from the crowds.

This morning, I slide up to Tom on my belly.

“Your other pole’s jingling,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “But I got a pike on this one. I don’t think he’s very big.”

My pants are getting damp and my fingers are getting cold and Tom is working the fish that he hooked on 6-pound test and perch gear.

“I got that pole over there rigged for pike,” he says. “He should have taken that one.”

He doesn’t want the line to snap, so he gingerly works the fish with the line in his hands. He thinks the pike got snagged on his gear. Every time he pulls it up, the fish runs and every once in a while he gets the tail up to the hole he has drilled before the pike slaps and dives.

“I got him right by the ass,” he says.

Tom graduated in 1968 from Kootenai High School and worked as a logger his entire life until a few years ago when he got cracked a good one on a logging job at Rainy Creek not far from the Montana border.

He’s been taking it easier since then. Fishing more.

Those pike the anglers caught in the other lake, he says, were probably a passel of smaller fish like the one he’s got on now.

It’s likely, but he’s not sure.

“I didn’t talk to any of those guys,” he says.

Most of them were from town.

He pulls the fish up and its tail slaps and the water boils and down it goes again.

A few more tries and he has it up the hole.

“It’s easier getting them out by the nose,” he says and drops the 24-inch pike onto the ice.

“He’s wore out,” he says.

The pike lays on the ice without moving. One yellow eye looks up at the low clouds.

Tom cuts the hook from its skin and stands up to warm his hands.

Ralph Bartholdt

Pot and kettle time at Cherished Ones

2010-01-21T14:42:00.000-08:00

It's prayer time and Kevin Kram is on the telephone.

The soup kitchen volunteers, college students, retirees, people with a penchant for helping others maybe in a way to help themselves hold hands in a circle around a table of stainless pots and pans and trays of garlic bread simmering from the oven.

The chain is broken by Kram's right hand.

It holds his cell phone.

"We wanted you to be part of this," the burly man with the dark eyes, camo hat and a Rebel with a Cause T-shirt says into the receiver.

Then he prays.

We bow our heads.

It's an upbeat prayer about standing up with Jesus, blessing volunteers and the men and women, teens and kids who wait in a line from the buffet to the back door and out into the parking lot where streetlights drop their yellow light and stragglers move from the shadows to join the file.

When it's over, Kram, the director of Cherished Ones Ministry, tells the person on the other end of the call that he loves her.

He chats and snaps the phone shut.

It's show time at Cherished Ones, one of Coeur d'Alene's hidden soup kitchens.

Outside, in the sallow sodium light, a bearded man with a quilted jacket waves his hands and talks quietly about the mountains.

"We didn't have those there, man," he says.

A stiletto shadow on his face.

"It's like you get out in 'em and it's all about history. You can see Indians shooting flaming arrows."

His hands are in front of him, his fingers curled as if he's kneading bread.

Inside there are pans of pasta: Spaghetti, stroganoff, and more. A college kid asks do you want some curried rice? It's yellow. He drops a scoop onto your plate.

Ham and potato pie, hoss, this is eating, says a rotund man with a ladle.

And this bread pudding, brother, I'll cut you a corner.

For a long time, the official word, the gospel according to the tourist-seeking community, said there is no poverty in Coeur d'Alene.

There is no homelessness and hunger.

Kram and his volunteers kick that around.

Every Saturday afternoon, and mornings at 4 a.m. when they deliver meals and condiments to the jobless looking for work downtown, they chip away at the paradigm.

The more than 60 people here dipping garlic bread into the puddles on their plates have got enough to eat tonight.

And they're home too, for a couple hours.

Last week a county deputy came in asking about a name.

"He gave this as his address," said the big man with the badge on his belt.

"A lot of them do," said Kram. "They don't sleep here."

The deputy looked around at the long tables scratched and surface scarred, the metal chairs and the buffet, quiet and clean.

"Yeah," he said. "I can see that."

It's a soup kitchen.

Seven in the lake city, a couple in Post Falls.

Come on in, grab a plate, you're welcome.

"We came from Seattle and we're glad to be back here," said a guy, mid 30s, with scabs on his knuckles, a pair of ill-fitting, taped-at-the-bridge spectacles and a neatly cropped beard.

"Back there it's crazy; they don't want you there. We were at the Nickelville in the city."

It's named after the mayor, he said. The police attempted to shut down the tent-city. There were some scrapes, a lot of ill will, nothing like this place.

Tonight at Cherished Ones three doctors give exams in a small room up front.

"Hey," someone says, "You should go see the doctors."

"I don't need no doctor."

"Yeah, for your lungs."

Kevin Kram tap taps a shoulder.

"You staying warm?"

"Yeah."

He looks around at the eating people, hears their discussions, and the atmosphere ranges from jocular to blank and reticent. There is another announcement.

He stands in front of the coffee and lemonade table, his brick-layer arms easily at his side, he's wearing running shoes and there's a small hole in the left leg of his baggy jeans.

His eyes are the kind that say hey, man, I'll do what I can for you. And I'll tell you about Jesus anytime.

How about now.

Listen up.

This and other stories about local soup kitchens and the people they serve is part of an exhibit at NIC's HREI beginning Jan. 26

Back to Virginia

2010-01-19T13:30:00.000-08:00

Terrie and Rob are going back to Virginia.

They packed up, loaded the pickup and are having their last meal tonight among friends at the Cherished Ones Ministry soup kitchen.

Darkness comes early this winter day and snowflakes hang like dust specks in the yellow cast of streetlights.

The windows of the soup kitchen are fogged. The large hall like a converted billiard parlor is noisy with conversation and the occasional clamor of pots and pans as people settle at the long tables to eat and visit.

"We couldn't make ends meet," Terrie, 35, says.

Despite working full time at a convenience store and gas station, cash for bills, including the always-looming rent, was too much for her $9 per hour income.

Rob, a carpenter, turns 50 soon and gets most of his work at Labor Ready, a private company that finds temporary jobs for the unemployed, but he hasn't had work in a while.

His age is an issue, Terrie says.

"They are always looking for younger guys," she says.

Terrie has a trade school degree in aviation, but hasn't put it to use here because jobs are scarce. Instead, since coming to North Idaho six years ago to be closer to her children who live with their dad in Spokane, she has done pick-up work, temporary service jobs mostly until she landed the full-time job at the gas station 3 years ago.

"I can always find work," she says.

The pay, though, is often less than marginal.

"If I was a single person, I would be struggling to pay rent," she says.

The couple lived in a house in Post Falls until their landlord passed away. The house was sold and they were on the street, living between motel rooms and campgrounds.

After the rent, child support, a pickup payment and car insurance, she says, not much is left of the $1,000 per month she nets.

Diane, 52, and John, 46, share a table towards the back of the room with Rob and Terrie.

Their combined income from social security and unemployment compensation is about the same, Diane says.

She was laid off from a local manufacturing company because of a drastic drop in orders and the couple has been pooling their checks to pay rent, car insurance and the power and phone bill leaving little money for anything else.

Diane is taking business courses online and with the help of a grant, John is enrolled in communication courses through NIC.

For them, the soup kitchen's role is two-fold.

"We come to eat for the most part," Diane says. "We come to talk to people, and be with people."

By 7 p.m. things are winding down. Many of the tables are empty and the garbage cans are full of paper plates and disposable cups.

Terrie and Rob say their good-byes. There are hugs and best wishes.

The side door that empties onto East Indiana Avenue opens and closes letting in cold air and the smell of snow.

Then they go too, pausing at the side door.

They turn once more to say goodbye.

"Send us a card when you get there," someone says. "Just a card. You don't have to say anything else just, Made it OK, so we know."

They agree.

The door opens revealing night, and then closes again.

This story and the story and photographs of others who use local help services is part of an exhibit starting Jan. 26 at the Human Rights Education Institute.

Scooter tramp

2010-01-14T14:19:00.000-08:00

He is trim, athletic, 48-years-old, stands 6-0, with short brown hair and blue eyes that twinkle in a handsome face.

A bushy, hazel beard falls to his chest. The beard and the physique would mark him, elsewhere, as a big game hunting guide, a traditional woodworker or a man with a Harley soft tail minus an electric start.

T, the man in question, might have been all those things at one time, or none of them at all.

"I've done a lot of things," he says. "I've met a lot of famous people."

He pushes out a hand with a firm grip and his eyes spark with what seems like mischief or delight in adding a new face to his memory bank. He wears jeans and a long sleeved jacket under a black, leather biker vest with patches sewn on.

"I've partied with Ted Nugent," he says. "I've been featured in National Geographic, Reader's Digest..."

It's a laundry list of magazines that were once the staple of waiting rooms, some of them no longer in print.

He sprinkles conversation with a mantra: "I've worked hard all my life," he says.

He tells of seven successful businesses. One of them earned over a million dollars a day drilling or trading Middle East oil. It is unclear which.

He tells of his experience as a Vietnam veteran and as a special forces soldier.

"They put a chip in my arm, right here," he says. "I don't know why they put a chip in there, I guess they want to track me wherever I go...

“I can probably build you a laser.”

He is from Montana, he says, then adds that he was born in Yugoslavia, or Russia and stolen as a baby.

Montana is where - bingo? - he worked as a hunting guide and met Ted Nugent in a bar playing pool, drinking beer and whiskey.

"I got him on a world-class antelope," he says. "Its side prongs were out to here."

He gestures with tattooed hands.

The musician killed the antelope with one shot behind the ear, he says, but not before putting a .270 round through the cab of T's pickup as he pulled a rifle from a stand-up gun rack by the seat.

He built the wooden gun rack himself, he says.

He had a ranch in Anaconda, but a woman took it from him, or he lost it in a divorce.

Details are sketchy. He shows a disfigured hand and says the woman slammed a door on it, prompting the loss of a finger.

They fought.

Domestic violence.

It went to court.

"She said it was an accident. Whatever."

The loss of digits, and near loss of limbs seems to follow him.

After a wreck on Spokane Street where a double tanker truck ran over him with two sets of dual wheels and crushed his mountain bike and bones, the doctor said the right leg had to come off below the knee.

"I was crying, saying no, doc."

He kept the leg, but after much surgery lost an ankle. T takes off a boot, rolls up the pant leg and removes a tube sock to show the scars.

The medical bills were $75,000 and he's awaiting a settlement, he says. He doesn't care about the money.

"I make $600 a month from Social Security," he says.

The Social Security Administration allows him to collect payments early because "I worked hard all my life," he says.

T looks at you when he speaks. His blue eyes sparkle from under a baseball cap that advertises a sporting goods store, his face is weathered but still maintains an air of impassioned innocence.

"I like these people," he says. "We all love each other and help each other. We're a community."

He came to the shelter today for some clean clothes, a shower and a hot meal.

He smokes a cigarette when he talks and the smoke rises calmly into the cool of the alley court where others sit at a picnic table, also smoking.

He lives in motels, he says, then acknowledges that the mummy bag he got from Fresh Start has saved his skin on several occasions when the winter temperatures dropped at night.

He was a famous painter once, T says.

"You know that eagle with the American flag around it? That's mine. I did that," he says.

Parkinsons - he shows the shake in his hands - prevents him from steadily holding a brush, he says.

Run his name through the Idaho court records system and you'll find a few minor traffic violations from long ago.

Look in Montana and a list of alcohol-related offenses jump out. Excessive DUI. Some prison time. His name, perhaps inadvertently Americanized, or purposefully by himself, is decidedly foreign. His birthplace shows Delaware.

Today, though, for all intents, T is a Montanan, ex-hunting guide, a woodworker and a former biker who is homeless in Coeur d'Alene.

"I'm just an old scooter tramp," he says. "All I got out of my bike is my vest, and it has a lot of miles on it."

This story and the story and photographs of others who use local help services is part of an exhibit starting Jan. 26 at the Human Rights Education Institute.

Concrete Ken

2010-01-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

His wrists hurt, he says.

Might be from the cuffs.

They were pretty tight.

When the cops arrested him and threw him in the Kootenai County Jail where he spent seven days, he was certain that he'd be released on his own recognizance.

He pleaded not guilty and the the judge set bail at a couple hundred dollars until the prosecutor said the word homeless.

The judge changed his mind.

Bail was made $1,000 and Ken's next court date was a ways off.

This is Ken's story and he tells it with a resigned ferocity.

"The judge hesitated," he said. "It's all on tape.

"Why would they want to keep a homeless guy in jail and feed him three meals a day, when they keep saying the jail is overcrowded?"

He has his own theory and isn't one to keep it to himself.

"I was sure I would be OR-ed," he says.

A gentleman whose driveway he shoveled last winter when the snow kept falling, burying hedges, caving roofs and covering windows heard he was in jail and posted bail, Ken says.

Ken is 56, a former concrete contractor and sheet metal worker. He has done many jobs, mostly in the construction trades, but "I'm not gonna say I done all this stuff," he says spreading his arms like he's about to catch a giant beach ball.

"I've been kind of a Jack-of-all-trades," he says.

He was injured in an industrial accident. An airplane exhaust system hoisted by a forklift fell on him blowing out a vertebrae and damaging the nerve that runs from his back into his right leg.

He received workman's compensation for a time, sold his house and belongings, but the bills crept up and when his wife left with the children, he stayed with friends.

Then he took to drinking and didn't stop.

Not for a long time.

"I spent a winter along I-90 living in the bushes," he says.

The money he had, he spent on booze until the reckoning.

"I spent 7 or 8 months drinking heavily. It was the stereotypical drinking your woes away," he says.

He quit when he realized that it was better to use his skills being productive than it was to just plain destroy his liver. He volunteered at a warming shelter by painting, installing cabinets and building furnishings.

Ken has a white scar on the bridge of a bulb nose and a tight, gray beard that gives him the air of a no-excuse construction boss. His steel eyes make him larger than his thin, 5-9 frame.

When he volunteered at a day shelter he ran the place with a hammer fist, he says, kicking out drug users, drunks, and the thieves, because "they needed to be kicked out," leaving the shelter for the homeless who were trying their best to stay clean, sober and looking for work.

That's how he got in trouble.

He was chasing someone off, away from a shelter when the cops pulled up.

The man said he was trying to start a fight, but Ken vows that isn't true.

He didn't lay a hand on the man, he says.

"I never raised my voice," he says. "I was showing restraint."

The man, he alleges, was caught rummaging through other people's mail and Ken had booted him out, but he kept returning.

"I was walking behind him telling him what a piece of shit he is," Ken says. "And he is."

Before he became homeless four years ago, he often drove his 1972, 520 hp GMC pickup down Sherman Avenue towing his boat, belittling the downtrodden people he saw walking with a backpack and what looked like a sense of aimlessness.

"I'd think, cut your hair, get a real job," he says.

His views have changed.

"I went from having everything a man needed to living on the street," he says. "I learned more about living on the street in the last few years than I ever wanted to know.

"I was never really aware about how much homelessness there was until I became homeless."

He lauds the city, and the many volunteers and donors in Coeur d'Alene who actively participate by helping out or giving clothes, food or money to the many programs meant to stem the problem.

"If anybody goes hungry in this town, it's because they are too lazy to eat," he says.

There is at least one soup kitchen open every day, he says, and clothes including warm winter clothing are also available at the shelters, or via the network.

"There is no reason to be dirty or hungry," he says.

The lack of a roof over one's head, and a job, is another issue entirely.

Ken volunteers his skills that include painting, mudding sheet rock, building cabinets, trim work, anything that doesn't require heavy lifting in exchange for having a warm place to stay.

"I still have enough pride, that I have to earn things," he says.

That pride kept him off the CityLink buses that some people use to get out of the cold and wet for a few hours. The ride is free, so Ken, naturally, avoided it.

"I would rather walk than get a free ride," he says.

Ken moved to Coeur d'Alene 28 years ago to be near his dad. He moved north from "the southern tip of Texas."

He was raised there with a fishing pole in his hand catching spiny rays.

"We had crappies down there that weighed 4 1/2 pounds," he remembers with a relish that shows in his eyes.

Before his father died, and before Ken landed on the streets, he spent his free time on area lakes with his dad hunting bass, perch, sunfish and crappies.

There is a new joy though that sparks when he speaks.

He found it here, on the streets of Coeur d'Alene, helping people, who have, like himself, fallen on hard times.

"I hear people say, Oh, you're such an angel, helping people, and this and that," he says.

They say the Lord put him in this situation so he could be a model to others, but Ken isn't buying it.

"I say bullshit to that," he says. "It's just a matter of happenstance."

He can see himself regaining his former stature as a tax-paying citizen. He can envision it and often does.

"Of course I want my old life back," he says.

But no matter what happens, he says, he will not turn his back on the people he met in the last four years.

"No matter what happens in my life, I'm still going to help the homeless," he says. "If things work out in my life and I have money, am I going to go on vacations and stuff? I see myself working and helping other people."

Ken's story is part of a photo and story exhibit on area homeless that opens Jan. 26 at the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d'Alene.