The Nest

By Frank Honorof

In 1980 the author, and his wife, decided to leave the frantic pace of the big city that they had both known their whole lives and move to the diametrically opposite setting of rural North Idaho to raise their family. They also relocated their quickly growing electronics manufacturing company and employees t a town 60 miles from their new home. In order to be available quickly they bought a small plane and built an airstrip at there home.

This work is a humorous view of their first 10 years and the changes to their priorities and values. This book is not only entertaining, but is a guide for anyone contemplating a move to the edge of civilization. It is of particular interest to anyone who is, or wants to be, a pilot and fantasizes about commuting to work and play by air.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626758681

Book preview

ISBN: 9781626758681

Introduction

Writing this memoir was not a labor of creative writing, but rather an effort that involved remembering and verifying—by way of other people and files of documents and photos—the actual sequence of events. Of course the real effort, which was for the most part a joy, was in living it. In that vein I want to thank my wife, Carol, who with some trepidation acceded to my wish to live this lifestyle, and who at times suffered the consequences of my impetuousness. I could not have enjoyed the journey this book describes without the generosity of our three children, JJ, Jill and Tony, who allowed me to share their childhood, and who participated in making memories that at the time must have seemed daunting to them.

My editor, Frances Woods, not only dealt with the results of the delinquency of my formative education in the use of our language, but added comments and corrections that made the text comprehensible. I thank her for her diligence.

I extend special thanks to Melissa Jones, who is an extremely gifted artist in many disciplines, and who never visited the ranch, but was able, with the help of old photos and conversations, to capture the spirit of the book on its cover.

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1. Let’s Get Out of Here

Chapter 2. Pick It

Chapter 3. The Move

Chapter 4. Early Warning (Unheeded)

Chapter 5. A Man’s Home

Chapter 6. Local Politics

Chapter 7. Beware the Witch

Chapter 8. Construction (P)

Chapter 9. My First Red Toy

Chapter 10. Big Toy Two

Chapter 11. I Almost Ate It Again (P)

Chapter 12. Getting It Together

Chapter 13. How About a Runway? (P)

Chapter 14. Jean-Claude and the Slopes

Chapter 15. The Delorean

Chapter 16. The Adoption of Mr. Maule (P)

Chapter 17. River Rafting

Chapter 18. Flora and Fauna et al

Chapter 19. Logging

Chapter 20. Look at the Idiot (Huffing and Puffing)

Chapter 21. The Dark Side

Chapter 22. The Mozart Affair

Chapter 23. O Tannenbaum

Chapter 24. Carol’s Atomic Garden

Chapter 25. Woody Woodpecker (and Frank Fudd)

Chapter 26. More Boy’s Toys

Chapter 27. Soiree

Chapter 28. The Little Log School

Chapter 29. The Rice Paddy

Chapter 30. Changes in the Wind

Chapter 31. Moving Day

Chapter 32. The Sale (Almost)

Chapter 33. That Good Old Open Range

Chapter 34. Local Politics II

Chapter 35. A Day with the Friendly Firemen (P)

Chapter 36. A Dog Fight With the Navy (P)

Chapter 37. Independence Day

Chapter 35. A Word on Traffic

EPILOGUE

Note: A (P) above indicates a chapter of special interest to pilots.

PROLOGUE

A number of people harbor a secret desire to chuck the hectic city in exchange for a more peaceful rural setting. To enjoy a quiet life in a seemingly insignificant place that terrorists have little interest in attacking, a place where people still strive to give their word and do the best they can to keep it. Many wish but few try for a variety of reasons.

This is the story of a city boy and his wife, from Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area respectively, who actually did it. And did it in an often unprepared fashion that made for exciting and frequently humorous (if, at times, expensive) learning experiences. A true story of their first ten years, during which time they adjusted to the social and cultural values of their new home, although it sometimes felt like a foreign country. This is an accurate view of their trials and tribulations, successes and failures, and the panorama of things they learned that the city never taught them. It is an overview of the wonders of the real life that can be had if one just does it.

In the organized existence of city life, people take many things for granted, including mail delivery, grocery shopping, medical services, school systems, even garbage pickup—services that, for the most part, have facilities with easy access. People make use of these things, often almost unconsciously, in the process of doing something else. Chores like dropping something in a corner mailbox on the way to a bus stop, leaving a garbage can at the curb to be picked up, or sending your child to the corner store to pick up last-minute ingredients for a meal are activities usually performed without much contemplation in a city. These same events need to be pondered carefully in a rural environment. In such a setting there are no corner mailboxes, and the post office or country store might be a twenty-minute drive. The garbage has to be taken to a central collection point some miles away—to a place where hungry animals, such as bears, may be waiting for dinner, though hopefully not of oneself.

The support services—emergency medical, towing, and other personal services that are a phone call away in the city—in a rural area are more than likely far enough away that you need to learn how to perform basic maintenance functions, physical and mechanical, without professional help.

Generators, tools, battery chargers, tire inflators, a variety of lanterns and flashlights, medical supplies, etc., are implements that need to be available.

There are wonderful benefits. The defensive cautions of self-protection one might exercise in city life are based on the unpredictable nature of one’s fellow man. In rural areas motivation for such acts is to protect oneself against the generally predictable nature of wildlife.

Here a person can drive about on uncluttered streets with little fear of irate, hurried, or careless drivers presenting a safety threat to one’s self and family. The rural driving precautions lean towards being cognizant of tractors and other farm vehicles, and of herds of cattle, deer, or other wild animals attempting to cross the road while one is speeding by.

The general paranoia of humans living in cramped areas, requiring care or aggressiveness to get their share of natural experiences (at beaches, parks, etc.) is almost eliminated in areas where one can participate in the wonders of nature without much human competition for the space. You can see your children grow up with few man-made threats and watch as they learn a more natural view of existence.

Please note numbers have been used to describe costs, speeds, distances, and the size of places and things. Many have been written in alphabetic form so the book didn’t read like a physics text. I have used CDA to refer to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, as it is used often. I sincerely hope that you find this to be a pleasing read, and that it gives some valuable guidance for adjusting if you make a similar move.

THE NEST

By Frank Honorof

Copyright 2010

Chapter 1. Let’s Get Out of Here

Two years earlier I finally got up the courage to leave the violence and apathy of Southern California for the beauty and peacefulness of Lake Tahoe. After a period of adjustment to my new bachelorhood, the fates gave me more than I deserved—I met and immediately fell in love with the most beautiful and caring girl in the world. She is a perfect match for me because her disdain for bureaucracy in any form—government, business, church, or family—matches mine. The difference between us, thank god, is she has the good judgment (unlike me) to pick her battles with an eye to their effect on her life, and mine.

We wanted to raise a family but both agreed that Lake Tahoe, which we had come to love dearly, was not the best place to bring up children. Crime was a problem even though it was not at big-city levels. The large numbers of people who came for a few days to visit or were experimenting with a new lifestyle for a few years made for social instability.

Our electronics company, which manufactured its product in Los Angeles and was managed and marketed by our Tahoe office, was finally taking shape as a profitable and fast-growing enterprise. Carol and I weighed the pros and cons, and we agreed that I should leave the business if necessary, but that where we raised our family was more important than how we fed ourselves. Carol reminded me that I was a licensed certified public accountant and could, if necessary, resume that profession to provide an income, and I knew my wife was bright, mature, industrious, and possessed judgment well ahead of her years. She could find work easily and contribute to the household budget.

First, we decided on the parameters for possible locations. It would have to be rural but with one hour accessibility to medical services. A reasonable price for acreage was a necessity as was a less aggressive business style, in addition to which high local ethical values were important. Most of all, the new location would have seasons. We agreed that well-defined climate changes made life considerably more interesting. Our new home would also need lots of lasting snow. We were both avid skiers and had become used to Tahoe with its prodigious snow in winter. Our ideal location would have to be no more than an hour’s ride to an international airport. Accessibility to my children from previous marriages and to Carol’s family were very important. Once an area met these needs, the final home site would need to be defensible.

We had watched the decay of society and political upheaval, and we were convinced that major disorder was coming from internal as well as external sources. It was 1978, and we were a few years premature in our prognostications, but our analysis would be, unhappily, verified by events such as Oklahoma City and 911, which were not a long time in the future.

Chapter 2. Pick It

The selection was based on a detailed personal evaluation of a number of candidates by my bride and me. In reality the process was limited by economics. That’s not to say that we modified our parameters—we didn’t—but the geography was settled by available funds.

We traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Bend, Oregon; Whitefish, Montana; and a number of Canadian areas stretching from Cranbrook, British Columbia, west thru the towns of the Okanagan Valley. California had earlier been eliminated as it had already proved to be directly in the path of uncontrolled growth. In our jaded view of what the world was becoming, population was a thing we wanted to avoid. We set our sights on a one-hundred-acre or larger parcel if we could afford it. It had to be near or in mountains, with a heavy winter snowfall and access to ski areas. We paid little attention to the viability of earning a living—something we decided would be dictated by the economics of the community.

After months of frustrating and exhausting travel squeezed out of a tight work schedule, we were beginning to have doubts. On the completion of a trip to Vernon, B.C., to look at some specific parcels we had read about in a local real estate guide, we became slightly disillusioned. The properties looked good on paper, but we found that they were ecological nightmares due to uncontrolled logging in the past.

After dealing with the disappointment of the visit, I remembered from another era in my life the city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a sleepy community best known for its proximity to beautiful Coeur d’Alene Lake and the forested hills that lined its shores. I had promised myself upon first visiting there in 1965 that someday I would like to live there. This compact with myself was tucked away in my memories and folded neatly under a load of real life concerns, including failed marriages and business ventures, creditors, and the ever-present paranoid political and social threats I had conjured up, over a decade before their time.

We discussed it and made plans to take a week’s vacation and return to the Inland Northwest, in a hope that my memories might lead to reality for our new life.

The train from Reno ended up in Sandpoint, Idaho. This was as close as Amtrak got to Coeur d’Alene at that time. Sandpoint was a tiny community nestled on the shores of Lake Pend D’Oreille, a huge freshwater sea some ninety miles south of the Canadian border. The lake is the accumulation of the Clark Fork River that files a huge, deep natural depression on its journey to dump its water into the Columbia River. The lake is over thirteen hundred feet deep in some places, and almost thirty-five miles long, with an average width of four miles. Besides Sandpoint and a few other tiny communities along the shoreline, it was a place of unspoiled beauty that was little known except to the sports fishermen who came to try for the fabled Kamloops trout.

These wild fish are a unique species growing in few places. They look similar to a lake trout, growing very large (many in the sixty to eighty pound range), but instead of being lunkers that one just slowly reels in, these guys fight like real game fish, such as German brown trout. This characteristic draws serious game fishermen from around the world to this relatively obscure body of water.

Right away, we decided to evaluate this area, working with realtors and investigating the local ski spot, Schweitzer Mountain, along with shops, schools, et cetera. We were quickly convinced that we had found Nirvana. Except that as we talked to the natives, we found that while the ski area three thousand feet above the city got a great deal of snow, the city at its lower elevation