The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, "Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning! If you are, it's me you're looking for. Doors will be open at 10 scro,l. The others are smart.

It has n't any title, either. My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.

I traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole , one of the "hands" on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather.

Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm , and for me a "Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read.

Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant States and cities.

He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose destination was the same as ours.

Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes, too! This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to "Jesse James. I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska.

Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska. I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with lanterns.

I could n't see any town, or even distant lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby.

There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west? I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history.

A long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them.

The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we followed them. I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over.

When the straw settled down I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

No, there was nothing but land — slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.

I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me.

The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be. I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind.

A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed. Then in a very different tone she said, as if to herself, "My, how you do look like your father! Bring your things; there's nobody about. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement.

This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed — the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts.

The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water.

When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help. Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy. It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously.

While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, "Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning! She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements.

Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance. After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went.

Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work. While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat — he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told.

The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors there.

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him.

The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive. Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular — so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life.

He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits.

His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia , and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in Bismarck , a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather. The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a "perfect gentleman," and his name was Dude.

Fuchs told me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his "chaps" and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design — roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.

These, he solemnly explained, were angels. Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several Psalms.

His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word "Selah. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk — until you came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived in sod houses and dugouts — comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards.

This slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen.

This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I. North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks , grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees , low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard to see it at all.

The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house. As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her sunbonnet on her Olson Skip Tooth Scroll Saw Blades head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house , and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth.

A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer. I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.

Alone, I should never have found the garden — except, perhaps, for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines — and I felt very little interest in it when I got there.

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.

While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in the garden awhile. The big yellow and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there.

That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big 'possum , and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him.

In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I'm at work. Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little.

The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content. I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.

There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers , twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.

The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.

I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. O N Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land.

Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big cornfield. I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high wagon-seat one could look off a long way.

The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew; some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms.

They made a gold ribbon across the prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in time to his bites as he ate down toward them. The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek , and had paid him more than it was worth.

Their agreement with him was made before they left the old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell them anything he chose.

They could not speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials.

He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of much use here, though he used to pick up money by it at home. And I hear he's made them pay twenty dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten.

I'd have interfered about the horses — the old man can understand some German — if I'd 'a' thought it would do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians. Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. It would take me a long while to explain. The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw Creek , which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas' place and made the land of little value for farming.

Soon we could see the broken, grassy clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales. As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away.

Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass that grew everywhere.

Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black Hawk.

She was not old, but she was certainly not young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically. Immediately she pointed to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no good!

Grandmother nodded consolingly. Shimerda; make good house. My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good, much thank!

The oldest son, Ambroz, — they called it Ambrosch, — came out of the cave and stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face.

His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.

I remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called Yulka Julka , was fair, and seemed mild and obedient.

While I stood awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's foot.

When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, "Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo! His mother scowled and said sternly, "Marek! He was born like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer. At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his forehead.

It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow.

His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes — like something from which all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral pin.

While Krajiek was translating for Mr. In a moment we were running up the steep drawside together, Yulka trotting after us. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop until the ground itself stopped — fell away before us so abruptly that the next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls' skirts were blown out before them.

She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say. What name? I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, "What name? We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like "ice.

She got up on her knees and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently. She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of words.

She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I did n't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never seen before.

No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was how they behaved. When I came up, he touched my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds. I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted by my elders. We went with Mr.

Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian.

O N the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony, under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the post-office, six miles east of us , and I saved the men a good deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse , I was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads.

Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons ; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.

The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.

Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom. I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches.

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests underground with the dogs. We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about.

They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies.

We felt sorry for the owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the desert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that some of the holes must go down to water — nearly two hundred feet, hereabouts.

Almost every day she came running across the prairie to Olson Scroll Saw Blades Near Me Id have her reading lesson with me. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was important that one member of the family should learn English. When the lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife , and we lifted out the hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers.

The white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with curiosity. They were to Olson Scroll Saw Blades Amazon Quick View be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries. She would stand beside her, watching her every movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs.

Shimerda was a good housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions: the conditions were bad enough, certainly! I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment.

The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast. During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk or from whom they could get information.

He slept with the old man and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown owls housed the rattlesnakes — because they did not know how to get rid of him. W E knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two girls were light-hearted and never complained.

They were always ready to forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie, scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk. Nice mans, Mrs. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very nice! I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big dog-town.

I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other country — farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole.

Of all the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable, so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends. Krajiek could understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they avoided him.

Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist; since he had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn tight over his high cheek-bones.

His breathing was hoarse, and he always had a cough. Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short, bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to every one, men as well as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool.

His rosy face, with its snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves. He was usually called "Curly Peter," or "Rooshian Peter. The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked apologetically under the seat.

After Mr. She said they came from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there together on my pony. The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass well beside the door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big melon patch, and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod. We found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub.

He was working so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard. Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. The milk was good for Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream with a wooden spoon.

Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it in a new place. After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up the hill in his wheelbarrow.

Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men who were "batching. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window, where they kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots. That day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter; corn and beans and fat yellow cucumbers.

There were no screens or window-blinds in the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies and sunshine alike. Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them, they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound.

He gave us knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with juice and seeds. I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate. He assured us that they were good for one — better than medicine; in his country people lived on them at this time of year. He was very hospitable and jolly. He said he had left his country because of a "great trouble. When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that would entertain us.

He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very doleful, and he sang words to some of them. Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in.

We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk. O NE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank where the badger lived.

It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time. That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside.

Then the dog dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for every badger he had killed. The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon.

They kept starting up all about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all dead — all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us — a thin, rusty little chirp.

She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs and roots she had dug up in the forest.

If you took her in and gave her a warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked voice, like this. Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.

What were we to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the magical light of the late afternoon.

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.

That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death — heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.

We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet along as if he had no purpose.

We broke into a run to overtake him. As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her cheek.

She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live. She turned to me. Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata. He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood looking down at the green insect.

When it began to chirp faintly, he listened as if it were a beautiful sound. I picked up the gun he had dropped ; a queer piece from the old country, short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock. When he saw me examining it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well. Very fine, from Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you.

I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected substantial presents in return. The old man's smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it.

As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.

This change came about from an adventure we had together. I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled — hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections; whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins. The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres.

The grass had been nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the surrounding country, but gray and velvety.

The holes were several yards apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground.

Before the mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up, we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole. If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried it so far?

It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure. We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which much travel went. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen.

When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter "W. He was not merely a big snake, I thought — he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones could n't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled.

I did n't run because I did n't think of it — if my back had been against a stone wall I could n't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils Pegas Scroll Saw Blades Review Video tighten — now he would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops.

I struck now from hate. Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. You sure? Why you not run when I say? You might have told me there was a snake behind me! I suppose I looked as sick as I felt. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill.

She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed head. I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with the spade while I tied a noose around it.

We pulled him out straight and measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long. He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for his age and size.

He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off to the end of his tether and shivered all over — would n't let us come near him.

As she rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all. Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the rear.

Minority populations were hit hardest. A Johns Hopkins University health professor said the U. Past, present, pandemic By Lyndsie Kiebert Reader Staff Messages surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic in Idaho are becoming increasingly more optimistic, with Gov.

In Bonner County, 2, residents have been recorded as having the virus, and 33 locals have lost their lives in the pandemic fight. North Idaho has proven over the past year to be a hotbed of opposition to health orders and other measures taken to mitigate the spread of COVID, resulting in protests, lawsuits and countless heated political exchanges. Health care, education, municipal government and business adapted, arriving at what now seems like a major turning point in the coronavirus saga:.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare announced March 2 that Idahoans who fall under the vaccination eligibility subgroup 2. Meanwhile, local institutions began to adapt. The Lake Pend Oreille School District closed schools on March 17, , moving entirely to remote learning for the remainder of the school year. When it came. Cases slowly went down for a couple of months, until October launched the area into new, harrowing territory.

The most cases logged in one day in the five northern counties came on Dec. The health district logged its highest one-day number of hospitalizations Dec. The rise and fall of virus-related deaths per day mirrored those peaks, with eight North Idahoans dying in a single day on Jan.

The East Bonner County Library. District became a battleground for the debate over masks, when protestors inundated the Sandpoint Library in July. The debate persisted inside of Sandpoint City Council chambers, when two attempts to enact a mask mandate failed in July and August. When PHD enacted a panhandle-wide mask mandate in November, Bonner County and Sandpoint law enforcement took a stance of education, not enforcement.

Across Idaho, those numbers are , and ,, respectively. The Panhandle Health District is not currently offering its own clinics in the county because the entire weekly dose allocation is going to community providers who stepped up to assist with distribution.

Still, BGH is only scheduling a week of appointments at a time in order to make sure every appointment has a guaranteed dose. Those who wish to register can do so at bonnergeneral. Kaniksu Health Services is also offering online vaccine registration at kaniksuhealthservices. Jim Woodward, who represents our district. Woodward was one of only nine Idaho senators to vote against SB, a resolution aiming to make it nearly impossible for Idahoans to get an initiative on the ballot by increasing the number of districts needed for signature gathering from 18 to The purpose of this bill is very clear: Idaho Republicans want to make it increasingly difficult for Idaho voters to use their constitutional right to gather signatures for an issue to appear on the ballot.

The rest of the time has been spent fighting ideological battles that end up going nowhere. Last year, when the Idaho Legislature passed a similar bill attempting to limit the ballot initiative process, Gov. Brad Little vetoed it because it was unconstitutional. Little again comes out on the side of the Constitution. I am on the board of the Sandpoint Senior Center and I help out by writing thank-you notes for the donations we receive.

A couple of the checks indicated they were donations using the stimulus money. So, I guess great minds think alike. Loris Michael Sandpoint. Fulcher is embarrassing us… Dear editor, Our U. Was he mentioned for his eloquent oratory? Was it for a brilliant legislative proposal?

Instead, during the first impeachment hearings, with other Republican representatives, he broke into a secure hearing room, armed with a cell phone, which was prohibited at that site, and pizza, as though it was a party. He was not authorized to be in that room during that time. More recently, Rep. Fulcher tried to walk around a metal detector to enter the House chamber, and, when. If he was carrying a weapon, I certainly hope he was fined, per the House rule.

Fulcher seems more interested in breaking the law than making law. His idea of governing seems to involve thuggish pranks and outright disdain for the rule of law. Is that what we are paying him for? As far as I know, he has done nothing for the people of Idaho.

Speaking of which, exactly what are his goals? Since he voted not to certify the election, I conclude that he is not interested in helping us create a better future. Rather, he is concerned with beating a dead horse, the recent election, and looking to the far past for solutions to current problems.

I hope the Democrats find a serious candidate for Fulcher has proved himself unworthy of his position and title. Ann Warwick Sandpoint. Ski safety at Schweitzer Dear editor, I am interested in making skiing safer at Schweitzer, and am curious whether anyone else has similar concerns. I was hit by an out-of-control snowboarder while skiing at Schweitzer on Jan I was hit from behind without warning and have a fractured fibula.

My ski season is probably over. We have been increasingly concerned with the prevalence of fast, out-of-control skiers and.

Avoiding fast, reckless traffic is often a factor in our terrain choices. A ski instructor was seriously injured two seasons ago and there was another recent collision that had one person air-evacuated and another by ambulance. There have been others. There is little visible enforcement of safety rules at Schweitzer. Ski Patrol does not have a particularly visible presence, and mountain hosts who sometimes enforce safety rules are seldom seen on weekdays.

There is too much tolerance for reckless, out-of-control skiing and riding. Some aspects of skiing are inherently risky, but having to deal with fast, reckless skiers and riders is unacceptable. The presence of out-of control skiers and riders is partly a choice made by the institution that tolerates it.

I would like to see Schweitzer develop a more robust, visible culture of safety. Minimum standards should include: 1. Providing sufficient staff to effectively monitor and patrol open slopes and trails; 3. Maintain a comprehensive, publicly accessible safety plan and five years of complete accident statistics.

I hope I can feel better about safety at Schweitzer in the future. Donald Laumann Sandpoint. Over the past nine years, and under the current rules, only two initiatives have made it to the ballot. The other initiative, which was funded by out of state interests, failed.

Clearly, SB will prevent grassroots in-state initiatives from getting on the ballot, taking away the right of every voter to vote on them. The only possible route will be for initiatives to be funded by big interests, not our own. The bill, sadly, is expected to pass the House very soon. Then Gov. Little will be able to veto it. Idahoans convinced him to do this the last time a bill like this was proposed: he received over 1, phone calls and petition signatures asking for a veto and less than in favor of that bill.

Convincing Gov. Little to stand up for us again is our big chance of stopping this bill from becoming law. Please sign the petition asking Gov. Little to veto SB At stake are planned initiatives to fund our schools and other issues our legislature refuses to address. Here is a link: bit. Nancy Gerth Sagle.

Bird Charter Schools may decide to return to campus every school day, a shift that began March 1. Previously, students attended school either under a hybrid schedule of two days a week or online. Prior scheduling was based on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, then-rising community spread of COVID, and the protection of immune-compromised staff.

Full-time online students will remain online for Trimester 2 and may continue for the rest of this school year. On May 4, all students attending school in the building will be in school four days a week. Before the pandemic, every Friday was an online day for students, and this will continue going forward. FBCS made the best decisions for. Learning happens the best in person.

With an interest in all those narratives, I solicited stories from friends on my Facebook page, inquiring about their recent personal experiences good, bad or otherwise with buying, selling or renting within the greater Sandpoint area. Emily Erickson. I kick myself. Unless the market crashes. Which is frustrating because finding a decent rental, especially one that will take a pet, is nearly just as hard.

After renting for most of the time, I purchased my first home ever in At the time we bought, prices were just starting to go up so we feel that we really scored a deal on our one-acre [plot and] home in Dover, where houses down the street are now selling for half a million. I have considered selling.

But, in order to sell, you have to have somewhere to go. We can complain about increased housing prices, but we are equally to blame. Change is inevitable and growth is happening. When possible, donate to or volunteer with the organizations. In the balancing act of sellers and buyers, newcomers and renters, we have to actively seek out and create solutions to maintain the kind of community in which the people who are essential to its fabric are also afforded the opportunity to live comfortably and well.

Nuclear fusion is a real thing scientists are experimenting with now, and it could forever change the way human beings deal with energy. Humanity currently has a few major sources of energy: fossil fuels, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind and nuclear fission, all of which behave very differently but utilize the same mechanics to create electrical energy: turning a turbine.

Take a hydroelectric dam for example, it utilizes gravity pulling water downward over turbine blades attached to a generator. The action of the water turning the blades and cranking the generator converts this mechanical energy into electrical energy that we can then utilize in power grids that are fed directly into our homes and offices.

As complicated as nuclear fission is, at its core, it utilizes extremely hot temperatures created by volatile elements breaking apart decaying and releasing energy as heat, which converts contained water into steam that is pushed through a vent to spin a turbine. Basically, a fission reactor is a Rube Goldberg machine using extremely advanced science to spin a wheel, and nuclear fission is more or less fission in reverse.

Fusion results when lighter elements such as hydrogen smash together to become heavier elements, creating heat energy in the process. This is the same process that takes place inside of every star in the universe — in fact, stars could be described as giant fusion factories spraying light and heat into the cosmos. Fusion is so vital as a form of energy transference that it is responsible for every other form of energy currently available on Earth.

This algae likely utilized photosynthesis, like all modern plants, by which it would absorb light from the sun to trigger a reaction that would split carbon dioxide CO2 , utilizing the carbon to further grow and reproduce while spitting out the oxygen as waste. Some of the energy of this reaction was stored in the carbon, which is then released as it is subjected to heat and converted back into carbon dioxide, which generates a heat reaction and release of energy in the form of a tiny explosion.

Due to this monstrous size and indescribable heat, it makes a natural fusion reactor wildly impractical to build on Earth. An object that large would be extremely dense and create a tremendously huge magnetic field, which would rip Earth into a smattering of atoms in a matter of nanoseconds.

Instead, we attempt to build a much smaller version of the sun, one that we can control. So how do you control the sun? Scientists effectively create a vacuum chamber filled only with the gases they want to fuse, then utilize magnets to push the contents of the chamber together to create intense pressure and heat. Once a reaction takes place, it creates heat and energy, which causes a cascading effect that triggers more reactions, which in turn triggers even more reactions — very similar to how fission works when triggering a nuclear weapon.

The vacuum chamber also prevents this reaction from running wild and escaping into the rest of the world. Strangely enough, one of the biggest benefits of fusion energy may be how we could begin to recycle plastics.

Plastic poly-. However, when these products are subject to intense heat, such as the heat at the surface of the sun — somewhere around. The future is bright! Stay curious, 7B. They suffered a. She married an year-old veteran when she was only A major task each legislative session is creating and approving a plan for how we will spend our state tax dollars in the upcoming year. The legislative session typically ends in late March. The budget year starts in July and runs through the following June.

When we finish this session in the next month or so, we will have a plan in place for Fiscal Year , which starts this coming July 1. The first part of setting a budget is anticipating the revenues for the following year. State revenue consists primarily of income tax and sales tax.

The state income tax rate is 6. The amount of revenue those two taxes generate is dependent on the level of economic activity of the state during the year. How much people earn during the year and how much they buy determines total tax revenue and therefore the total budget. We make a best guess of what will happen during the upcoming year,. In an unexpected economic downturn, such as the recession in , revenue does not meet expectations.

This situation requires budget adjustments during the year to make sure spending does not exceed revenue. In FY, our current fiscal year, actual revenues are greatly outpacing anticipated revenue. There are three primary contributing factors for the additional revenue in this budget year.

Second, the federal government has provided higher levels of Medicaid funding as well as other funds for public safety costs. Finally, economic activity has been higher than expected. All the money described above is available for use this year, but it may not show up again in years to come. In other words, this is onetime state revenue, not ongoing. The plan to utilize the addi-. All three are planned as one-time expenditures to match the one-time nature of the revenue. In addition to the deliberations about FY, we are working on a plan for future years to provide more ongoing transportation funding for state highways as well as local road systems.

I hope to have details in the upcoming weeks. It was my honor this week to present House Concurrent Resolution 3 on the Senate floor. The USS Idaho is a Virginia-class nuclear-powered, fast attack submarine currently under construction. The state of Idaho is particularly important to the Navy submarine fleet. The Acoustic Research Detachment in Bayview plays a part in the development of our submarine fleet through acoustic testing in Lake Pend Oreille.

Near Idaho. Falls, the Idaho National Laboratory has been an integral part of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion program since its beginnings in the early s. We now have two submarines with Idaho names: the USS Boise is a Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine commissioned in and still serving the nation; the USS Idaho will be the newest of the fleet in Thank you for the opportunity to represent the community at the state level.

I look forward to hearing concerns and input on legislative actions. The easiest way to track legislation is on the legislative website: legislature. Email is the best way to reach me: jwoodward senate. Jim Woodward is a second-term Republican legislator from Sagle serving District 1. He serves as vice-chair of the Transportation Committee and holds seats on the Education and Joint Finance-Appropriations committees. When I started my first term in , nearly every long-time Capitol observer told me it was the worst legislative session they ever experienced.

In , they told me that was the worst legislative session ever. Why is that? It can be a thrilling, adrenaline-pumping experience. Or it can be a head-spinning, stomach-turning nightmare. Or both. But in the end, after all the ups and downs, twists and turns, white-knuckled fist-clenching and primordial screaming, you wind up back where you started. It seems every year the legislative roller coaster becomes increasingly more extreme.

The plunges are deeper and the turns skew sharper to the right ejecting some occupants from their seats. But in the end, the Legislature makes little or no progress by the end of the session.

When the dizziness and nausea from the legislative roller coaster subsides, you can then head on over to the Fiscal Fun House!

I and my colleagues have proposed legislation that will provide real tax relief for working families:. Unfortunately, majority party leadership has thus far refused to allow these ideas to be discussed, debated or come to a vote. It looks like the Legislature may once again fail to prioritize working families over its political squabbles. He holds seats on the Business, Education and Local Government committees.

Before my husband and I joined forces to become arborists, I was a librarian. I loved it. The interaction with community and books and ideas filled my cup. Well, mostly it did. I admit that I often stared longingly out the windows, wishing I could topple the walls around me and be outdoors. When the opportunity came to work outside with my husband, I jumped on it. Not only did I do it to be out in the elements, but also to make a living wage.

I supplemented my librarian living with work as an editor and columnist — neither of which pay well, either. Combined together, though, it sort of penciled out. Skilled manual labor, however, was a revelation. Not only could we pay the bills, but we actually saved up a little in reserve. No longer was there a sense of impending doom when the car needed new tires or a cell phone crapped out.

Though we still lived in a camper trailer together, those first few years gave us a sense of moving up in the world. We could buy beyond PBR. During this time, I still occasionally filled shifts at the library when needed. It was a good way to keep my toe in community and literary waters, feeling connected to things I still held dear. However, during those substitute shifts, I encountered an interesting array of patron reactions regarding my change in employment status.

Jen Jackson Quintano. Why in the world did you leave such a respectable job to do work like that?!? Never mind that I could make three times that running a chainsaw. Never mind that I was actually happy. The perception was that the change from librarian to laborer was a downhill slide. I felt that I had somehow disappointed my community. I admit that my first few days on the job found me questioning its respectability, too.

When end-of-day clean-up found me filtering twigs out of rocks in a gravel driveway, I lamented the squandering of my college degree. Surely, I was not the kind of person who did this work, right?

Such a thought begs the question: Who is supposed to. Is there a type that belongs on the other end of a rake? Once, on the job, I was asked if I had graduated from high school. It was a friendly question, born of simple curiosity and the desire to connect and converse, but… holy cow. The assumption was that, as a laborer, I was likely uneducated and making do with limited options.

At first I was offended. I wanted to scream: I was valedictorian, graduated summa cum laude from a respected university and I own this shit! Instead, I just smiled and told the man, yes, I had a diploma.

And that was that. People who use their bodies for work likely do so because their minds are lacking. Or so the story seems to go. The movie Office Space comes to mind when I think about this divide. White-collar Peter absolutely hates his job as a programmer at Initech — the tedium, his smarmy boss, the TPS reports — while his blue-collar neighbor, Lawrence, seems happy piecing together seemingly menial gigs.

At the end of the movie, with Initech in literal ruins after a disaffected employee burns the place down, Peter finds himself working side by side with. This is the beginning of his new and contented life outside the office. Just thought you should know, Jenny. The thing is, though, my work is not that much different from that of my family before me.

My dad sells heavy machin-. His father owned businesses in oil, gas and propane. I am just one in a long line of people working close to the earth. None of us has ever had to file a TPS report. Parents always want better for their children. I love my job, and it supports my family.

Jen Jackson Quintano writes and runs an arborist business with her husband in Sandpoint. Find their website at sandcreektreeservice. To submit a photo for a future edition, please send to ben sandpointreader. Top: This quiet winter scene was captured while driving home from Sandpoint. Photo by Tricia Florence. Bottom: Laura Phillips took this photo from her deck on Thursday, Feb.

Photo by Laura Phillips. Mountain pine bark beetles were spreading through the forests at a record rate and there was a lot of concern about the health of the forests and the amount of standing dead timber.

I wrote the following piece in December after working in Custer State Park for a few wonderful months getting intimately familiar with the terrain. A story about finding happiness in getting dirty and solace in wild. I hope you can find yourself in my story.

We started out small. There were only three of us. Myself and two crazy boys who had competitions to see who could mark the most trees or go the longest without eating that ended with a feast of four pizzas. Then another girl joined us and there were four.

We found the biggest bug spot together, over 1, And then we were fired. And rehired! And given a raise! The park was granted a bunch of money to fight the bug war! And then our numbers began to grow exponentially. And five more are coming! And the paint is flying!

We hike, scramble, crawl, scale and fall over, around, under and in the Black Hills as we identify, locate and mark the trees that are infested with mountain pine beetle.

We cover ourselves with paint, bruise our. Lauren Mitchell in the outdoors. The places we climb to, the views that we see, the experiences we have; make each paint covered piece of clothing worth it. The other day I had the strange feeling that each time we started to mark trees that a theme song should be playing, weird I know. I had no idea what song it would be or even what genre. But I started to think about it and suddenly I began to hear a few notes drifting in.

The theme song was there, perhaps drifting on the edge of consciousness, but there all the same. And the bug markers of Custer State Park will continue to add to the music of the park as we grow to 16 strong.

Watch out bugs, the battles just beginning. Lauren Mitchell lives in Sandpoint and is pursuing a career as a land survey technician. Before settling in Idaho, she traveled across the United States to do conservation work and ecological research in incredible places from Arizona to Utah to South Dakota. According to a Feb. Prior to that, board members Kevin Smith and Carol Thomas left the organization in January and December, respectively. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this community at your beloved Panida Theater.

Amid all that, Walker also cited challenges posed by the film industry, which in recent years has transitioned to a streaming model that simultaneously threw up hurdles to small theaters and altered the viewing habits of audiences. We added more foreign and arthouse films than had ever been shown, we also added more popular and requested films to help revenue.

We purposely looked for areas that were underserved to expand. Work is love and it truly was a privilege and an honor to have worked at the Panida for nearly seven years. Skip Lassen and Jenny Post, like many rural North Idaho residents, found their dream homes in the woods, miles from town. Post lives nearby. They worried about traffic on their road and increased fire danger, as the area is largely forested.

The request was unanimously approved by both the Planning and Zoning Commission and the board of commissioner in the fall. Rural stewards About the same time, a group of Selle Valley volunteers were wrapping up three years of meetings on a comp plan update for the Selle Valley and Samuels area. The process began with a couple of rowdy community meetings three years ago at Northside Elementary School. Omodt later became chair of the Selle-Samuels Subarea Plan Committee, convened by the county to review the comp plan and recommend changes to meet the needs and desires of the rural community.

The county comp plan is the guiding document for growth and land use in the county, setting the overarching goals and objectives. The comp plan and land use map were last updated in The county hired planning consultants who hosted community meetings in which residents voiced concerns about sprawl, strip development and leap-frogging growth, according to a story in the Spokesman-Review. Gunter attended the initial Sagle subarea meetings, because it was his turn to defend the rural lifestyle from the inevitable growth that was coming.

At the large community meetings at Sagle Elementary School in , he found his neighbors largely agreed with. But he questions if county leadership shares those desires. Doug Gunter stands by a barn built in on his property in Sagle. Photo courtesy the Gunter family. But Gunter and Omodt see the county creating work-arounds for the density limits in the rural areas — such as the new recreational vehicle rule, which lifted the day limit of occupancy of an RV, and allows two per every lot over an acre in size.

The Selle-Samuels committee banned the RV rule in its plan. The result is a rectangular Rural Res-.

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