Tales from the High Lonesome: Volume 2

By L. Scott Hancock

Short stories of adventure, life, and insight into growing up when time was spent in nature and living the true spirit of the west. The stories are true, most are from my life in southern and the far north of Idaho. My life was lived and written about from the perspective of someone who used crutches or a wheelchair to amble about. People, animals, and nature-filled my cup to the brim. One can ask for no more. My family made me who I am by not treating me any differently than my siblings. I was expected to do what was needed for the welfare of all. Friends have completed the journey. I am grateful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669846284

L. Scott Hancock

I was born and raised in the upper Snake River valley of Southeastern Idaho. Natives call it Yellowstone country. After a young life of adventure with family, I graduated from Idaho State University and rambled a bit. Later, a job took me to North Idaho — and more adventures in the lakes and forest country. Leaving the bureaucracy, I started my own construction company and enjoyed it for thirty-five years. (The Pend Oreille country of the Panhandle holds a big part of my heart.) Relatives wanted me to “come home,” so in 2018 I moved to what we call “Someday Ranch.” My overwhelming gratitude to my first editor at the Morning News, Elisa (EC Stilson); she put the first book together. And to Ann Anthony, editor of the Island Park News. They both encouraged and inspired me. The stories are from my columns; I hope you find some of them enjoyable. Hopefully after volume 2, the third addition will be out in fall of this year.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 by L. Scott Hancock.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022916771

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover Photo By Jamie Reimer.

Rev. date: 09/27/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

843594

To Elisa, E.C. Stilson, violinist,

author, journalist, inspiration

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Haagen-Dazs On The Half Shell

You Never Know

Legendary Eats

Motorhome Sailing

Losing a Friend

Gatherings

Boots ’n’ Beans

Books

A Henry’s Lake Surprise

Overboard

Mr. Barber

Old Brown

Seems like Fall

Shining Angel

Simple Importance

Vanishing West

Trestle Creek

The Cardboard Nativity

Wisps of Smoke

The Simplest Christmas Tree

Tying Up Loose Ends

Waters of Spring

Hebgen, August 1959

Joseph and the Starship

Front Porch Time

Kienholz

Words, Including Grace

The Great Pumpkin

Somebody’s Gotta Do the Thinkin’

Potato Salad and Easter

The Bee Tree

Sublime Moments

On Hunting

Pop

A Thanksgiving Gift

Perspective

Odds and Ends

Moose Lodge #387

It’s Been/Will Be a Year

Idaho State University, 1971

Hash Slingers, Chili Dogs, and Oldsmobile’s

Fine Writing Instruments

Damned Tree

Code of the West

A Christmas Letter

Cleanup

Cemeteries and Memorial Day

Boone

Comments

Eulogies and Thoughts

The Bamboo Frond

My Ode to Wayne

About the Author

PREFACE

Southeast Idaho is my birthplace, Pocatello, the actual town with the sagebrush, pines, lakes, rivers, mountains, and mine from the beginning. Those of us fortunate to be natives call it Yellowstone Country. That massive caldera along the Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho border is in my blood from ancestors homesteading the Teton Basin and farmlands with my parents forging much of their young lives there. Early on I contracted polio, some say I was the first case in Idaho, perhaps but many suffered far more than I did. I witnessed suffering with long stays at the Elks Rehabilitation Hospital in Boise. My mother helped start what was called The Handicapped School first located at Idaho State University. Life was rich with an extended family that treated me the same as my siblings. I always followed many trails, especially after graduating from Idaho State University in 1971.

Eventually, I ended up in North Idaho for employment in social services and then started my own construction company in 1983 which I actively ran until late 2018.

I moved back to Southern Idaho in 2018 to be near the last of my family and married again after losing a wife to cancer. My first book, Tales from the High Lonesome came about after the move.

My tales are stories of people, places, and remembrances from my life. Everything is true as I recall. I have a book compilation of my weekly articles written for the Island Park News, Island Park, Idaho. The IP News has given me my voice for almost three years now, and I deeply appreciate that generosity.

A section in the back contains comments from friends and readers. Lastly, it ends with Eulogies and Thoughts. They are writings that are self-explanatory. They are eulogies for old friends and thoughts that can be applied in everyday life everywhere in America. Changing the place names and people involved gives the ideas credence.

My hope is the stories bring back good memories and evoke warm feelings in your heart. Readers guide me in speaking of how much they love my simple, down-home tales. High-caliber journalists and commentators can give you their story, I just want to bring a smile to your face.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book or any book has lots of people who see it to fruition.

First in line of thanks is my wife Colleen, my immediate proofreader who catches lots of early errors. Secondly, a huge debt of gratitude is due to Aaron Spickelmire for his painstaking editing. His work was perfect. All errors after his editing fall on my shoulders for items I added.

Overwhelming gratitude to my readers of the Island Park News, my editor there, Ann Anthony, and my beloved Elisa, (E. C. Stilson) who got all this started some years ago.

Lastly, to all my family and friends who encouraged the first book and now, this one.

Heart felt appreciation and thanks goes to my first editor at the Morning News, Elisa (E. C. Stilson), she put the first book together and to Ann Anthony, editor of the Island Park News. They both encouraged and inspired me. The stories are from my columns. I hope you find some of them enjoyable. Hopefully after volume 2, the third addition will be out in the fall of this year. Thank you.

HAAGEN-DAZS ON

THE HALF SHELL

Jerry and Sunny were already on the little dock that harbored our pontoon boat when we arrived. It was a typically hot August afternoon on Lake Pend Oreille, and fishing was an option for a nice afternoon on our private little part of paradise, our dock; we called it poor man’s waterfront. So we decided to have a BBQ by the water instead. Before the BBQ was started, Jerry produced two small containers of our favorite Haagen-Dazs coffee-flavored ice cream. His wife Sunny handed him a butcher knife, with which he proceeded to cut the cartons in half from the top down while they rested on the dock, producing four half portions of the heavenly delight. In so doing Sunny next handed him large tablespoons; he then passed one-half carton to each of us with a tablespoon, saying, There you go, Haagen-Dazs on the half shell. It was a Jerry and Sunny masterpiece of humor and home-spun genius. The Kendalls had become our friends after we first met at our regular coffee rendezvous each afternoon at the Holiday Shores Marina at four o’clock called the Liars’ Club. This small group of friends produced fodder for many of my stories, with a cadre of old lake rats, fishermen, and boaters in attendance.

The Kendall’s were special. Their travels around the country and part of their life in Alaska were intriguing. Sunny was as her name described, Sunny and happy always. She was one of those rare people who can turn a really bad day into an adventure with chocolate chip cookies thrown in. She was truly one of a very special group on earth who made it daily a better place to live just by their smile.

As time wore on, our friendship deepened and grew as we gained knowledge of each other, families, and past. They were our beacons of humor and support whenever needed.

The years passed and the deer hunts to Priest Lake and countless hours of trolling on Lake Pend Oreille—looking at the clouds and feeling the warm breezes of summer turned to the cool drafts of fall—were priceless as we spent them together.

We didn’t talk much during these times. The power of the camaraderie was compelling without sound. As we trolled or sat on a deer stand, I could smell the delicious scent on his pipe often before I could see him. Rarely today someone will walk by with a pipe aglow, and it takes me back to those times on Jack Pine Flats at Priest Lake and to the choppy waters off Ellisport Bay and the islands of the big lake, Pend Oreille.

Over time Jerry started to feel the change in Bonner County, and he didn’t like it, a change that was bringing in lots of newcomers who were often not happy with where they had moved to because they wanted it to be more like where they left. Go figure? So he felt his itch that had moved him many times before. One day they were gone! Over the months they had moved their belonging into mini-storages in other counties until they could decide where they wanted to land next. That way, after coffee one morning at the Holiday Shores Café, they could just drive away without long goodbyes to friends. It was Jerry’s style, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to do it any other way. The world couldn’t hold Jerry, his quiet dreams and imagination pushed him on always. He and his beloved wife Sunny built houses as they went, doing it all, including plumbing and electrical, and passing every inspection because of Jerry’s background working for such giants as Johnson Controls. Block work, along with brick covering the walls they built, was part of the complete experience they wanted out of each house. Designed by Jerry and built by his hands as well as Sunny’s, nail for nail, board for board, slowly they went up with precision and sweat until the last coat of paint or varnish was applied. Singular masterpieces when done, they were sold and the Kendall’s moved on. We visited them up the Clearwater at their Lawyer Canyon home site in and around Kamiah, having annual spring picnics on Johnson’s Bar and watching elk feed on the far side of the Selway River. Those were times in my memory that rank at the top of the heap of the good life.

I almost forgot to mention during this period both of them went back to school in Moscow and finished degrees started in their youth. I was so proud and happy for them. Life was good, but it was the beginning of a long slow flame dimming that came to mark Jerry’s life. As I wrote some months ago, I had a friend living now in the shadowlands—it was Jerry. He had to be placed in a care facility as his faculties became less and less to the point he didn’t recognize his wife. In one lucid moment, he told Sunny, I’ll figure out how to escape. They can’t hold me here. Two days ago, Sunny called to see if I had heard the news of Jerry’s escape.

He figured it out somehow and walked away from the care facility in Moscow to be found later, expired. I started to offer sad condolence to Sunny when she said, You were his best friend. You know that’s what he wanted, and they couldn’t hold that lifetime free spirit. She was right. It was what he wanted. At least he had time to read my book I sent at Christmas. I hope it brought some memory jogs that gave him peace toward the end! Goodbye, beloved blood brother!

Photo: Jerry and Brandy

Image%201.jpg

YOU NEVER KNOW

As I sat on the front deck of my house on Trestle Creek talking to my beloved young friend Bennett, I lamented my leaving and moving back to Southern Idaho, where my life began. He looked at me and spoke with wisdom way beyond his years. His message was simple but poignant, But you will always have the memories. After more than forty-four years I was moving back to the country of my youth near the last of my relatives and old friends. It was hard, as hard as anything I have ever done. But it was time, time to clean out the shed of paperwork after years in the bureaucracy and then my own construction business. It was time to clean out my head. Things that seemed so important they needed to be saved at one time went to the dumpster after a quick review and a toss. Was it cathartic? I don’t know, but it lightened the load of life in the past and made me see the future in a new light and direction. It needed to be. The move brought home to me the clarity of how humbling and short our lives are and that no amount of planning will guarantee the future or a happy ending. Living has a way of making its own direction without our input.

Mother would say to us kids, When you think you have it bad, look down the road a piece and you’ll find folks much worse off than you are. Dad, who had seen the bad around the world, would simply say, Hell, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.

They were truths, which ring as loudly in my ears now as they did then. When I look around, it doesn’t take long to see how good I do have it. My life has been a marvel of loving people, who helped me along the path and taught me how to share. And now, some of them are living in the shadowlands of their minds. One is a brilliant man who did some of the finest woodcrafts I have ever seen. He constructed wood fishing nets that rival the best ever made. Among other places, he sold them at craft shows in West Yellowstone. Recently, his wife sent us a handheld mirror of the finest detail with inlaid woods laminated together. Hopefully a fishing net will appear in their collection and I can buy it. When one who has been loved so deeply and greatly in a family is lost to the shadows, it hurts beyond measure. Physical limitations can often be overcome or altered with a reasonable outcome. Maybe that is not what we want, but accommodations can be made to ease the burden. This doesn’t happen when we deal with a mind that starts to stray and keep going away from the known of the past to the unknown of the future. The pain is so hard for those that love and see the slipping away. A friend in the Panhandle of Idaho is dealing with it now. My heart is with her and the family, for the husband and father leaving them by inches. I think of this brilliant man with the quickest of wits and a sense of humor that was stellar. We had so many great hunting trips at Priest Lake together and countless hours trolling Lake Pend Oreille hoping for the big, elusive Kamloops trout that swam below. I think of him and I am reminded of what Bennett said, You’ll always have the memories. Those memories, as my hair turns a bit lighter each day, are truly precious to me. Therein lies the purpose of my stories. They are reminders of times and events that held meaning and give us recall so we can share them again if only in our brain.

These are the things that bring me back to my connection to Island Park. Whenever I feel lost at heart, I can think back to all the good years and times I had in that magical place. Those of us with life equity in Island Park have a special feeling for the area. It is impossible for me to explain. Maybe it’s the physical feeling one gets when leaving the valley floor and climbing to the plateaued forest. Maybe it’s the nearness of Yellowstone. Then again, maybe it’s just getting into the high country that clears thoughts and makes us see the value of the day. I feel the same way about my North Idaho woods country. There is solace in the forest and peace out in the sagebrush that can’t be found in towns. At least I think so. My hope is that my friends living in those shadowlands of their minds are having fond memories of good times with friends and loved ones, knowing they are still loved. It puts life in perspective and shows us how lucky we are to have known, loved, and witnessed the good times that come before the unknown.

LEGENDARY EATS

As I have written before, I was raised in Pocatello after Dad took a job at the railroad. Our little town had some of the best resources for good eating in the West, brought to us by Union Pacific. People rode the trains and stopped in Pocatello for overnight stays at hotels like the Bannock. The Bannock was named after the local Native American tribe and was noted for its great chefs like Pete Moran and other top-of-the-heap kitchen magicians. The Bannock was so classy in its day. The waiters wore white gloves to serve food. My brothers all started out as pearl divers at