The Last Spotted Owl - Installment Six

Mom was not happy at her job and I was definitely unhappy with my school.  Summer was just starting and my usual plans of spending two weeks hiking in the Idaho Wilderness Area appeared sketchy.  Something about "Tick Checks" had not registered well with one of the parents of the previous year's hike and a new adult guide could not be found.

Tick Checks were harmless.  You take one adult and 25 thirteen and fourteen year olds, put them on a trail in the middle of the wilderness and have them strip naked and look for ticks.  What was the big deal?  There were still things I didn't know.

Keith Lincoln, a football star who played for San Diego and alum of Washington State University had offered Mom and a pal of hers jobs in Pullman, Washington.  Pullman is situated near the Washington/Idaho border, just four miles from another college town, Moscow, Idaho.  Washington State University hosted about 15,000 students a year with a like number in Moscow.  Between both towns there wasn't a permanent population of more than 8,000, most of whom were professors and college staffers.

Playboy magazine ranked beer drinking colleges across the nation in 1968.  When they got to the University of Idaho in Moscow they refused to rank them saying, “You cannot rank professionals with amateurs.”  In that year, The Rathskeller Inn of Moscow, Idaho pumped more beer than all of Germany.

There were a considerable number of farmers in the area as the Palouse valley was home to some of the richest wheat land on earth.

This was the starting point for the Russian wheat deals of the 60's and 70's.  Forty million years ago, when Mount St. Helens was building the first time, some of the richest soil anywhere had been deposited there and the resulting crops were staggering.  Millionaire farmers were as common as agriculture students in this part of the world.

Mom and I moved into the Washington Hotel on the 1st of June, 1968.  We had half the third floor of rooms to ourselves.  The Hotel was built in 1922 and the original manager of the place, a fellow named Wes Versteeg, was still there.  He had a family in Spokane, Washington, 80 miles to the North whom he rarely visited or spoke of. 

Wes was fond of telling people that he was 8 years old before his parents knew if he would walk or fly.  His ears were like great wrinkled pancakes stuck to the sides of his head.

The Washington had been quite the place in the 20's and probably stayed that way into the early 50's.  By the 60's it had run down considerably and by '68 the top floor was condemned, the 4th floor rooms were rented out as storage, while the 2nd floor and half the third floor were rented as small offices.  There was an elevator with the name "Otis" etched in big friendly letters in the threshold so I began talking to the elevator and called it by name.  "Third floor, Otis!"  I'd say on entering, or "Take 'er down, Otis!"  It was a source of amusement for the architecture student who rented the office nearest the elevator on the third floor.

If there were only two things to do in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho they were two more than in Pullman, Washington.  Beer drinking was done in Moscow where the drinking age was a year younger than Washington and why would anyone want to get into a fight for fun?

Where it was stupid to be smart in Coeur d'Alene there was nothing but smart in Pullman.  All the kids were sons and daughters of college professors.  All the High School teachers had advanced degrees.  There was a permanent commitment to enrichment and education built into the community and enlarging yourself, from the earliest age, was the order of the day.

For the first time in my 16 years I was surrounded by peers instead of jeers.  The mass of opportunities for education in Pullman made me drunk with fantasy. 

There simply was not a subject I could envision that was not only possible but had a whole department that was devoted to and supported it.

The cherry on top was that there were hippies.  Real hippies.  Intellectual hippies.  Hippies who were just like me and there was, right there, in the corner space, ground floor of the Washington, a head shop. 

The "Psych Shop" sold everything that started with the letter 'p': posters, pipes, papers, peace symbols; then the inverse, the 'b's: buttons, beads, black lights, etc.  Everything for the budding young hippie was in one place.  I was in heaven.

I had a job making pizzas in the evenings then as the janitor overnights.  I had cash money and the place to spend it.  The only thing I did not have was friends.  Half of me missed The Mob and the other half was crying, "Good Riddance!"  It was not long before I met my first real friend, a real hippie, a fellow named David Wasson.

Pullman is a dusty town.  Dust will build up on a window sill faster than Otis Fensil could draw his shootin’ iron.  I had selected two rooms as my own in the Washington Hotel and began painting them in accordance with songs by Cream.  There was a white room with black curtains and a room with many fantastic colors.

The first time I saw David Wasson he was right outside the hotel painting letters on the side of a van.  The van was the property of the City Senior Center and was used to take seniors on tours and field trips.  The staff had titled the van The Blue Bird and David was painting the name and some birds on the side.

I was excited.  I planned out what I would say to this hippie to start a conversation and practiced it several times before climbing out a window from the pizza parlor to test it out.

My practiced line, "I'm glad to see someone else will be covered in paint before the day is out." was intended to inspire the response, "Oh, what are you painting?" 

Then, I could say, "I'm painting my rooms, would you like to come see?"  That's how it would go.  That's how I planned it.

So, I said my line.

David, having been startled as I seemingly appeared from nowhere, said, "Wow!  Okay.  Cool, I guess."

Well, that wasn't the correct response.   This would take some effort on my part.  "A lot of dust gets into the wet paint."  I added.

"Yeah, it's dusty."

"Okay, well, have fun I guess.  See ya."  And I entered the window from which I had come.

"You live in there?"

Yay!  Interest!  An unsolicited response!

"Yeah, I just moved in!  You wanna see my rooms?"  And it was done, or begun, however you may see it.

David and I became fast friends.  He introduced me to everyone in the Psych Shop and took me around town to all the best places to hang out and talk.

It turned out that the Psych Shop was owned by the same fellow who owned "The Magic Mushroom," the head shop in Spokane, a gay man who taught at Coeur d'Alene High School.  He taught there until, of course, it was disclosed that he was gay.

Bobbie Kurtz wore ascots and Nehru jackets and big brass medallions hung from around his neck.  If he had smoked it would have been in a cigarette holder held like a baton.  How it had gotten past the administration of Coeur d'Alene high school that Bobbie was gay is a testament to their stupidity.  The rest of the world knew it at a glance.

I bought at least 25 or 30 black light posters, and a 4' black light, for my room of many fantastic colors and another dozen or so black and white portraits for the white room with black curtains.

David and I went to the Compton Union Building (The CUB) and explored it fully.  I was immediately at home in the cafeteria.  A huge room devoted almost exclusively to drinking coffee, study, lively conversation, and eating inexpensive food.

Of particular interest were the listening rooms.  There were two, one for Rock and one for Classical.  It was dumbfounding to me that anyone would listen to Classical music on purpose but I sat in there, in an obligatory way at first, then for the pure ecstasy of it.

The listening rooms were anechoic so the sound was absolutely pure.  There were huge soft chairs that were highly conducive to fantasy and my mind would roll around the sound the way an opium addict drifts among the lingering smoke.

About two weeks after my arrival in Pullman, David came by early one morning and we smoked a joint.  It was not my first joint but it was the first good joint I had ever smoked.  It was a joint free of paranoia.  It was a joint free of abuse or threat from those with whom I smoked.  It was a joint that made me feel good.

For a fellow who had never felt good about anything in his life, the first good joint was an offering from the gods.  If a joint made me feel that good I would come back to it every time I wanted to feel good again.  Other drugs would come and go, I would experiment, but I would always smoke a joint.

The K House would become a favorite haunt.  Its real name was difficult for humans to pronounce but it started with a “K” so it was The K House.  Winding stairs took you to the belly of College Hill.  Tables and benches with initials carved in them over scores of years would belie the history of which you were now a part since you were there.

Arts Hall was a certified trip.  For absolutely no reason there was a mannequin's arm that hung on the outside of this stately brick facade.  I'm told that from time to time it moved ... the arm, not the building.  Inside there was a door that was drawn so perfectly that one immediately tried to open it.

The theaters were open.  You could go into a theater and just ... 'be.'  I had grown up doing theater, around the theater, around theater people, building theaters, to say that theater was my life was the simple truth.  Here, the theaters were open. 

You didn't need a key, you didn't have to pay to get in, you didn't need an adult to accompany you, you didn't even have to ask, you could just go to the theater.  It was there and you were free to use it.

I was losing my mind.  It was being replaced with a new mind.

The summer olympics were over.  A couple of guys from the U.S. took a position on the world stage to make a statement about the strength of their race, that Black America had scored the win.  U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and died the next day.  The world was introduced to Dustin Hoffman, Mrs. Robinson and one word, are you listening?  Plastics.  We met Duke Wayne in Vietnam with the Green Berets and Mia Farrow ushered in the question of a Satanic Nativity with Rosemary's Baby. 

Richard Harris took us to MacArthur Park, Canned Heat took us On The Road Again, Iron Butterfly lead us to Inagaddadaveda (in the garden of Eden), the French tried to topple De Gaulle while the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.  500 students were massacred in Mexico and the Students for a Democratic Society had branches in every campus at every University in North America.

Saddam Hussein became the Vice Chairman of the Revolutionary Council in Iraq after a coup d'etat.  Truong Dinh Dzu was sentenced to 5 years of hard labor for trying to end the war in Vietnam.  James Anderson, Jr. was the first black soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor.  Outside the Democratic National Convention, Chicago police clashed with anti-war protesters in a brutal display.  In late August France detonated its first hydrogen bomb.  Hypertext was invented in the Summer of 1968.

The summer seemed short and hot and dusty.  Then, it was over.

The Last Spotted Owl - Installment Five

There were only two things to do when you were 16 on a Saturday night in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.  You could do one, or the other, or both, but there were only two. 

You could get drunk or you could get in a fight.

Getting into a fight was easy.  Getting beer, with a budget of zero, was hard.  Getting free beer was the primary mission of The Mob almost any night.

The Mob was eccentric even for Idaho.  In Coeur d'Alene the biggest nightly activity was 'tooling the gut.'  That meant driving from the Topper In'n'Out to the Paul Bunyun In'n'Out and back, over and over and over and over.  Sometimes you would park at the Topper, never at the Paul Bunyun.  Fancy cars, suitable for 'tooling' could consume a teenager's every waking moment and a considerable volume of cash.

The Mob's cars were these; Duffy had a VW bug, Dougall had an old Fiat, Phil had a Volvo, I had a Morris Oxford (no, I'd never seen one before and I've never seen one since), Gary had a Henry J., Killian had a De Soto, and Mike King had a conventional Ford.  All of them were 50's vintage and with the exception of the Ford and the VW they were almost always broken down.

The Mob did not 'tool the gut.'  The Mob sat in coffee shops for hours on end enjoying free refills and planning the next beer heist.  We did not go to the bowling alleys or “The Games” or anywhere the jocks might be.  We would go to the Noodle Inn, an old road house in the 40's that was now a Chinese Restaurant to which almost no one ever went.

The Noodle had a jukebox that played 7 songs for a quarter and included several Chinese operas as part of the selection.  The old Chinese couple who ran it, and lived in it, could not say, "Pepsi."  So if for no other reason than that, we would go there and order Pepsi's.  "Poopsi, Poopsi, Poopsi, coffee." she would say, repeating our orders back to us.

Plastic checkered table cloths were stapled to the tables and the old lady had a habit of smacking flies with a flyswatter on the stacks of plates piled next to the order window.  We were certain they never washed the dishes.

The Mob had four primary targets for free beer.  There was the Wolf Lodge Inn, Gittel's Grocery, Don LaVoi's Distributorship, and Killian's Corner.  We knew we could only hit Killian's once so we saved that one for one big score.  The others we could hit repeatedly but infrequently.

Don LaVoi's Distributorship was the local Bud dealer.  He also carried Hamm's and a couple other brands but we never knew what we were going to get at LaVoi's.

The warehouse was built with its backside facing Bum's Jungle while the doors faced the old highway out of town.  When they laid the foundation there was a large granite boulder directly in the centerline and rather than move the boulder they poured concrete around it.  At the base of the foundation next to the rock there was a hole that was no more than 14" across.  I, being the smallest, could fit right through that hole.

There was a trap door in the floor of the distributorship and when beer got too old or stale to sell LaVoi would have his guys open the trap and dump the beer under the floorboards.  They would pour rock salt over the bottles and though they tried to break them all there were quite a lot of failures in that effort.

You start to get the picture.

The first time I crawled through the hole I had a flashlight but was not bright enough myself to bring gloves.  After that I stole a pair of welder's gloves from the Husky Truck Stop and things went famously.

I would crawl in and dig through piles of broken glass and rock salt to find unopened quarts of stale beer.  The Mob would wait quietly outside and pass bags through the hole to be filled.  Gunny sacks, duffel bags, newspaper bags we'd saved from when we all had paper routes; then I would shove the filled bags back through the hole and eventually climb out myself.

From there we would go down to the river and wash the outsides of the bottles.  If the caps were rusty we'd throw them out.  Maybe three fourths of the bottles were pretty good and we would get a lot of them so our beer bust would be assured.

We only did this a few times.  Getting drunk on warm stale beer was not nearly the fun that we thought it would be.  There was vomiting.  It was time to hit Gittel's.

Gittel's Grocery had a reputation for watering down their gas.  It was owned and operated by the Gittel brothers who were easily the only Jewish people in Coeur d'Alene.  I don't think they actually lived there.  It was a typical mom and pop grocery that preceded the Circle K's and 7-11's of the world.   The Gittel's had a poorly conceived walk-in cooler the door of which opened on the outside of the building.

We were regulars there because the Gittel's couldn't tell a 14 year old from an 18 year old so we bought cigarettes there for years.  In those days every empty soda bottle or beer bottle could be redeemed for cash. 

Soda bottles were worth a nickel while beer bottles claimed two cents.  Some beer bottles, the new ones with screw caps, had a high plastic content and could not be refilled so they had no value except as targets for shooting practice.

So, here was the plan we cooked up at the coffee shop in the Modern Drug Store, the permanent Mob hang out.

For a week, everyone in the Mob would collect bottles.  We needed to have some that were non-redeemable in the mix.  Dougall and I would fill two gunny sacks completely with empty bottles and take them to Gittel's.  Now Gittel, either one of them, was a shrewd fellow and would never take our word for how many bottles there were.  So, he would have to leave the front of the store and go to the back room with Dougall and me to sort through the bottles and make sure he got the right count.  Dougall and I had to keep him in the back room as long as possible so there was a whole routine of "is this one okay?  Are you sure?  What about this one?  Did you look at this one yet?"

Finally, we would get an accurate count and head back to the front of the store and buy cigarettes with our redemption money.  Then, we would walk out of the store and say, "Goodbye."

Once in the parking lot we would turn left and go up the alley.  There we would find Duffy's VW and Killian's DeSoto packed to the hilt with free, fresh beer.  The others would have already made their getaway in King's Ford.

We only did this a couple of times before the Gittel's moved the cooler door inside.

The Wolf Lodge Inn was easy.  You just drove up to the back door and loaded up the car.  The inconvenience was that you had to go to Wolf Lodge.  It meant a drive around the lake road, and crossing the Blue Creek Bridge in the dark.

The Blue Creek Bridge was fairly high, well over 50' feet in the center.  It was from the center of the bridge that the water was deep enough for diving.  On the upstream side of the bridge there was a rope swing that traversed the entire creek, maybe 100 feet total.  Every kid who grew up in Coeur d'Alene knew that it was a one way swing.  You could go from North to South and the other way 'round but if you got stuck on the South end you were stuck.  There was no way out except down a steep 40’ bank to the creek.  Otis Fensel did not grow up in Coeur d'Alene.

In one instance, after pulling up to the Wolf Creek Lodge and loading up, some uppity worker had the bad manners to call the law.  Phil and I were already near the Blue Creek Bridge when we heard the sirens echo off the lake.  We knew exactly what to do.  We pulled the Fuck Truck into the woods on the North end of the bridge, grabbed the rope swing and pulled it up then ran to the South end of the bridge and waited.

We were not expecting Otis but it was that much better that it was he who found us.  We offered a friendly wave from our position at the top of the cliff and as he stopped his squad car we scurried down to the South landing, maybe 8 feet, and waited for Otis to arrive at the top on foot.  When he saw how close we were Otis gave chase.  He slid down the bank to the rope swing landing, by which time we were already half way to the other side.  He opened fire without so much as a, "Halt or I'll shoot!" but at that distance and in complete darkness he was impotent.

Safely on the North side of the creek we tied the rope to the bridge and scrambled up to the Fuck Truck and perfect safety.  Otis was stuck, he couldn't go up or down, he could not radio for aid, he could not shoot us, he could not identify us or the Fuck Truck as the get-a-way vehicle.

Now Killian's Corner was different.  We could only do it once and it had to be just right or we couldn't do it at all.

The name Killian was on the banner of a half-dozen pretty good ideas in Coeur d'Alene; small businesses all, but thriving because they were pretty good ideas.

There was Killian's Small Plumbing that just handled the little jobs for which a plumber would charge a fortune.  Killian's In-Between would deliver anything anywhere in town.  If you had a flood or fire damage that needed attention you'd call Killian's Clean Up. 

Killian's Corner was a tiny grocery store but with close proximity to an elementary school and the county government offices you could pay the rent in penny candy sales alone.  There were living quarters on the floor above large enough to accommodate a family of five.

All pretty good ideas, none of which belonged to Killian.

What Killian did own was Bug-Ex; a tree spraying service.

Our interest was in Killian's Corner.  They had beer.

Killian's Corner was maybe 250 square feet and 30 square feet of which was the cooler.

A Chinese family owned, ran, and lived in the building.  They made a comfortable living and put four kids through college there.

When Killian had it there were pictures that floated around of the shelves stocked with one can of consommé and a single loaf of bread.

The Chinese family had failed in one respect; they had not changed the lock on the front door.  Butch Killian still had a key.

Butch Killian had a couple of problems and as such was only a quasi member of The Mob.  First, he tended to bring and discharge firearms wherever we went and second, he was a terrible driver.  Where World War One pilots would paint iron crosses on their planes, indicating an enemy kill, Butch would paint mailboxes on the DeSoto.

Many were the nights there would be 6 or 8 of us crammed into the DeSoto and someone would call out, "Slow down Butch, you're not gonna make it!"

To which Butch would reply, "I'll make it!"  Then, WHAM, a mailbox would go down.

We would not be driving to Killian's Corner.

"Sleeping Out" was teenage code for "We're gonna go do something crazy tonight." Three guys would go to a 4th guy's house with sleeping bags and fool around until about 2:00 AM when the campaign would start.  Three guys were sleeping out at Killians and another four at my house.  Killian's Corner was on the other side of town so we would never be suspects.

About 2:30 the Killian group showed up at my place.  All tolled there were 7 of us with duffel bags, newspaper bags, and I had a little red wagon.  We made our way across town without drawing attention or making too much noise.

Across the street from Killian's Corner there was a welding shop and some railroad tracks that were no longer in use.  We laid down between the railroad tracks for some time as we sized up the area.  Cars went past and no one saw us.  Finally, we began our assault.

There was a stairway, four stairs, leading up to the front door in the corner of the building.  We hustled across the street and hunkered down beside the stairs.  Butch crawled up the stairs and tried his key ... it worked.  The door was open.  In absolute silence Butch crawled along the floor, opened the cooler, and began to pull out cases of cold beer.

Dingman was behind Killian at the top of the stairs.  He handed the cases out the door where the rest of us quickly put the booty into our various bags.  The last two cases went into my little red wagon.  These were cases of quarts.

Quickly, we made our way back into the shadows having carefully locked the door behind us.  The next challenge would not come for a few blocks when we had to cross 4th Street.

4th Street was a busy street.  It went straight through the whole town from one end to the other and as such was a major route for police.  Caution had to be exercised crossing 4th.  That was our biggest risk for getting caught.

We came up the alley by the State Employment Office and waited there.  We could see for several blocks in both directions for cars or activity.  A vacant lot was across the street and we would be in the open for at least a hundred feet.  We'd have to move fast.  Darrell Dougall and I had the wagon so we would go last.

I should mention that my voice had changed at about age 12 so I could sound like an adult at any time.  It was a skill that had been used to great effect for things like prank calls or letting the school know that so-and-so would not be in class that day; simple stuff.  So, when the guys were 3/4 of the way across 4th street I stood up and yelled, in my best grown-up voice, "Hey, you kids!"

Duffel bags full of beer dropped along side newspaper bags full of same and a flurry of leaves in the hedge beyond concealed my brothers in crime while Dougall and I laughed so hard we nearly peed ourselves.

Then, as casually as if we were on a Sunday stroll Dougall, I and the wagon load of beer sauntered across 4th, giggling and clinking in harmony along the way.

We split up after that.  Phil was near home, the others lived North, and Dougall and I kept to the alleys to Walnut Street until we got to Cathy Anderson's house.

Cathy Anderson was as cute as a pixie and had starred in many of my playtime fantasies.  She had hosted "Kissing Practices" at her home on a few occasions and Dougall and I had been in attendance so our love for her knew no bounds.  Her parents were pharmacists and fairly well fixed so they had a fully stocked liquor cabinet to which we had made liberal use in the past.

We stopped in front of Cathy's and cracked open a quart.  We drank to her and our fantasies of her.  We drank to her friends and to each other and finished the quart in time to watch the sun rise over the mountains having enjoyed our free, fresh beer.

The Last Spotted Owl - Installment Four

Growing up on the lake you came to know a lot of things that you didn't really know but you knew.  Lake levels rise and fall.  I knew that.  Sometimes they'd rise or fall a couple of feet or more.  Sure, I knew that too.  Land might be exposed when the lake was at a low level and that land would remain land for years before disappearing again.  Yep, knew that.  When the lake was low you could sell that land.  I did not know that.

Now that I think about it, Skip Kindler owned the Fuck Truck.  Skip was in his 20's but we pal'd around together a lot.  His father had been friends with my mother.  He also owned the Silver Spray.

The Silver Spray was a small and highly maneuverable tug boat that worked the lake and had a fire fighting nozzle mounted midship.  The nozzle could shoot a stream of water 150' which was perfect for disrupting competing keggers on the beaches.  Alas, the Silver Spray was at the bottom of Lake Coeur d'Alene where it remains today; the victim of cruel maritime safety regulations and the ignorance thereof.

We could have used the Silver Spray.

Skip's Dad and One-Shot Charlie had surveyed a great deal of the land around Lake Coeur d'Alene before anything like development took place.  Skip's Dad had purchased quite a lot of that land, particularly land that was called "Waterfront." 

Skip's Dad passed away when Skip was still in his teens.  As a result, Skip owned quite a lot of waterfront.  Skip also owned Harrison.

Well, in 1965 the water level fell about three feet and it stayed low for about three years.  As a result there was a bay which Skip owned that was no longer a bay but a marshland.

Some enterprising young developer saw this as an opportunity and put up three things.  He put up a fence that ran the entire width of the bay.  He put up a 40' dock and he put up a sign that read, "FOR SALE."  Skip wasn't gonna put up with any of it.

You knew, just by looking, that this was not the real lake level.  You could see the water line on the basalt surrounding the cove.  You'd be an idiot to buy this land.  But I guess the fellow selling it thought he was pretty smart.  The access road was inaccessible in Winter and nearly impassable in Spring but not for the Fuck Truck.  Skip and I just put on the chains, dropped the Jimmy into compound low and drove in.

It was about a week after I had turned 16.  It was dark, about 11:00PM when we got there so right off we didn't see the FOR SALE sign and accidentally backed over it a couple of times.  We were so embarrassed that we took the sign and hid it in the lake.

The road was not clearly marked anymore either so we got a little lost and accidentally drove over 400 feet of fence.  The fence likewise, was not clearly marked.

The dock was a problem.

We couldn't do anything about the piling.  That was driven down to bedrock.  It was simple to detach the chain; bolt cutters, even a 3/4" ratchet would get the thing loose.  To get the dock to some other part of the lake where it did not constitute a safety hazard required a boat.

The Silver Spray had sunk.

Dick Smith had a boat.

Dick Smith was an amiable fellow.  His face was almost perfectly round, as were his shoulders.  A junior City Councilman, Dick was well liked and well connected in the community.

As a sportsman, Dick had all the accoutrements; guns, a snowmobile, a goat (a small sort of motorcycle), and a 10' aluminum boat and an 8 horsepower outboard motor for fishing and trapping.

It was nearly 1:00 AM by the time we made our way around the lake road and out to Dalton Gardens and Dick's home.  Dalton was a little North of town.  We had to stop to take the chains off the truck and we wanted to get a can of gas so that Dick couldn't say, "I don't have any gas!"   We stopped at Elsies for some hot coffee and donuts as well.  Dick would want coffee.  The donuts would seal the deal.

By 2:00 AM we were on the lake putting along at maybe 8 miles an hour.  The property was an hour away at that rate.  Dick was cold.  He wasn't used to adventures the way Skip and I were.

Skip and I had gone on a number of adventures in the Fuck Truck.  We went windmill salvaging through Central Oregon.  We took every back road in Washington for a few days just to see where they lead.  We went hunting for dilapidated railcars to line the road approaching Harrison.  And in the pre-satellite days we drove up to the relay tower that fed the West Coast ABC affiliates to see how hard it would be to patch in a gay porno during My Three Sons.  It was do-able, we just didn't do it.

When we got to the dock it was easy going to unchain it and lash it to the boat.  The little engine chugged along and by the time the sun was rising over the mountains we were smack in the middle of the North end, close to the city and our destination, the Blackwell Slough.

That's when I lit the joint.

Dick was steering so Skip and I stretched out on the dock passing the joint back and forth, giggling.  It took a while for Dick to catch on but when he did he started to panic.

"OH GOD!  I'm out here in the middle of the lake with a stolen dock and couple of acid heads!" Dick exclaimed.

It was a nice dock, well made, brand new; we should have taken it to Harrison.  Skip and I looked out at all the beautiful summer homes and cabins that lined the lake shore.  We talked a little about what the residents might think seeing a dock in the middle of the lake chugging along with Dick Smith at the helm.

This just made Dick crazy so we cut it out.

At the mouth of the Spokane River the current began to move us along at a pretty good pace.  We steered the dock into the slough and with very little effort the current helped it snap into two 20' pieces that wedged neatly into a bend.

Somehow we'd managed to be on the wrong side of the dock in the end so we had to go out the other end of the slough.  It was the long way around and meant going under the new bridge and past the Old Folks Home, an old mansion that had been converted into a state home for the elderly.

Dick was still rattled over our blatant violation of city, state, and federal narcotics laws, as well as the damage done to his person having seen it all so when we passed the pipe that dumped raw sewage from the Old Folks Home directly into the Spokane River, he just about came unglued.

"Did you know about this?" he demanded.

"Everybody knows about this, Dick.  It's been like that since before the railroad."

Dick's junior city councilman mind went numb with the implications.  There would have to be a special levy or an L.I.D. to extend sewer service to the Home.  The pipe might be out of city limits but there were developments downstream and Post Falls.  Those fatheads were always raising hell about the crap floating downstream from the city.  No, this was terrible.  There would have to be a special session called.

"We can fix it if you'll buy breakfast at Elsie's."  It was my idea but Skip saw the whole thing as soon as I said it.  Dick argued a little but we assured him we had the solution.  He agreed.  We loaded his boat and motor back up on the Fuck Truck and drove to Bum's Jungle.

Bum's was a little stretch of pine parallel to the river and adjacent to the rail line that ran North out of town and right under the new bridge.  It was used primarily by The Mob as a place to have beer parties since no one else in town would go there.  We could hop freights there and go for rides.  We could get loud and rowdy without disturbing anyone and in the summer we could fly on a rope swing hung from the new Blackwell bridge and into the Spokane River.

Yes, we were swimming in raw sewage but it was a really good rope swing.  You had to lift your legs to clear some rotten pilings then go out far enough to miss the deadheads floating just under the surface of the water.  Clearly a superior rope swing in every respect.

Dick asked us maybe 40 times, "What're you gonna do?"  We just told him he'd see when we got there.  It didn't take long.  We turned the Fuck Truck around so we were ready to go out.  I reached into the lockers for the blasting caps and dynamite I had stashed there after staking mining claims the previous summer.  A half stick would do the job so we took two.

One last tap on the door to make sure Dick was okay, "I don't wanna know what you're doing, I'm not watching, I don't see anything, I don't know anything."

"You sure, Dick?  It's gonna be pretty cool!"  No response so we went on our way.

It only took a few minutes and we were back by the truck staring in the direction of the bridge and the river.  It was a righteous blast that blew a 10'x10'x10' hole in the river bank and eliminated any sign of the existence of a sewage drain.

We climbed in the cab of the truck and drove off down the rough road.  The first cop car just whizzed past us.  The second cop car stopped us.  It wasn't unusual to see a vehicle like the Fuck Truck, with a boat and motor lashed to the rear, and three passengers in the early morning hours in North Idaho.  The cop wanted to check us out so he could say he did.

"Oh, good morning Mr. Smith!" said the officer, immediately recognizing the councilman, "Doing some fishing?"

"No, just testing the waters." said Dick.

"Say, did you hear anything like an explosion back there?" queried the cop.

"I did hear that." said Dick, "you say it was an explosion?"

"Yeah, we think so.  Did you see anything up there?" the cop stared right at Dick.

Dick looked right at the cop and said with a clear eye, "I didn't see a thing."

"Okay then, thanks for your time.  You be safe now." and the cop waved us on.

Breakfast at Elsies on Dick Smith's dime was more than welcome after such an adventurous night.  The side benefit of having a 10'x10'x10' hole by the river in Bum's Jungle was that The Mob would never have to carry empties out after another beer bust.