Towards the fall, after my seventeenth birthday, Dad finally got a real job with a regular source of income: delivering the Spokesman Review newspaper. The route was actually a combination of two routes. It covered all of Priest River and all of the drops between Priest River and Sandpoint, and that side of Sandpoint. Because we lived in Coolin, we had to get up even earlier than the already insane hours required for the job. And "we" is the operative word here. Eliyah usually did not run the route himself, and never on Sundays, which were the worst. Either Raphah, Sarah or I went with him, folding and banding the papers as he drove. Sundays sometimes involved the whole family, because the Sunday paper came in two parts that had to be assembled, and it was fat, so you couldn't fold it; it had to be rolled, and the bands broke a lot, and it wouldn't fit nicely into the plastic bags provided for us to wrap the papers in. Sundays were a pain.

We took this route over from a man named Denny Driver. He was moving due to marital issues, getting a divorce because he'd taken up with a 16 year old girl. He was into horses. Now, for some reason I don't understand, we ended up cleaning out Denny Driver's house for him and packing up his stuff and storing it. The impression that I got was that he was giving or selling his stuff to us, but I have no idea what was actually going on. I only know that the entire family cleaned up what he apparently didn't want, and we stored it in a building a block away from the large office space we used for the paper route work.

Now, here is another thing that I don't understand: my mom and Eliyah somehow got a brand new truck when the old crew cab quit working. It was a bright shiny red GMC truck, the small, cute kind. It may have had something to do with Dad being friends and business partners with Steve McNearney. Maybe Steve cosigned on it; I really don't know. I can only say that we got a new truck, and yet our standard of living was still pretty bad, and we had no real source of income other than the paper route. Moreover, we soon got another new vehicle, a blue Chevy Blazer that would seat most of us. Now that Dad was in Sandpoint every single day, he began working for the food bank, picking up donations from Yoke's and Safeway and delivering them to the food bank. Of course, because of this, we got a lot more food from the food bank than we used to.

The paper route was grueling. We had to get up at about 3 in the morning, gobble down some breakfast, and ride to Priest River and pick up the bundles of newspapers at the drop spot at the post office. Then the rider (such as Raphah or I) would hurry and roll and band a lot of papers as quickly as possible while Dad started driving to the boxes. You had to have a paper in hand, positioned for him to grab easily when he stopped, or to shove into the box yourself if it was on your side of the street. I learned to fold two papers at a time, one in each hand. If you got behind, Dad would get angry and start yelling, "Paper! Paper!!!" with increasing volume. You did not want to get behind. Also, he would start threatening to not take you anymore if you couldn't keep up. And believe it or not, this was a valid threat, because despite the yelling, and the sleep deprivation, and not usually eating anything until we got home at 10 AM or later, and the carsickness, we loved going on the paper route. We were all desperate to get out of the house, to see the outside world. Until the paper route, we had hardly been to Sandpoint. And although we usually sat in the car the entire time unless we were allowed to get out to go to the bathroom, being able to see everything was terribly exciting, even if we were imprisoned behind the glass window of the truck.

One day when I went along on the paper route, I did get out of the truck. Or rather, Dad actually told me to get out of the truck. He gave me $10 and told me to buy myself breakfast or whatever I wanted and left me near the Cedar Street bridge. Then he drove off to talk to a business contact, saying he would pick me up again after a while. I was stunned. Ten dollars seemed like a fortune to me. And I had been set free in the middle of Sandpoint! I was at a loss. For a fleeting moment, I thought of calling the Christson family to come and get me, but I knew that this would be futile. They would never help me get away from my family. It was early, about 9 AM, and most of the businesses were closed. There was a small greasy spoon type cafe, and there were people in it, but I felt funny about going in there, all alone, surrounded by strangers. I was afraid to, even though I was hungry. Besides, ten dollars! Think of all the things I could buy with ten dollars! I didn't want to waste it on a breakfast.

I wandered up one side of the street and down the other, feeling excessively self conscious. I sat on a park bench near the Cedar Street Bridge and gazed for some time at the flowers in the planters, mentally cataloging them. I had spent so much time poring over seed catalogs, even the flower sections, that I knew what most of the plants were. Then some people came along and sat on a nother bench not far away, so I got nervous and left and entered the Cedar Street Bridge.

Inside, the first thing I came to was a woman artist making pastel portraits, many of them children. I saw from the publications she had near her display that she was also a Seventh Day Adventist. Even though Adventists didn't use the Sacred Names, I felt a kinship with them because they also kept Sabbath and didn't eat pork or other unclean foods. I stood there for a very long time, possibly an hour, looking at the work she had hanging and watching her draw. She was using pastel pencils, not the chalky things that I had tried at home, that got all over my fingers. After she was done, she sprayed fixative over the work. She was very good. I walked over to an ice cream shop in the building. They had mocha ice cream, so I ordered a waffle cone. I still had seven dollars left and was wondering what else I could buy when Dad reappeared, pocketed the rest of the money, and took me back home.