We drove for a long, long time, for what seemed like forever. Mike and I sat with Kary when we could- he was more fun. We played twenty questions and talked with Mom and Denis using the walkie talkies. From time to time we were amused to see Dennis's hand flopping out the window, the cold air flowing over his hand being his way of staying awake. We saw Mt. Shasta. Finally, we stopped to rest and breakfast at a very nice pancake house.

As we perused the menus, I noticed Lisa and Mike giggling and whispering, but the menu was so tempting that I was more engaged in choosing. The waiter arrived and politely asked us what we'd like. I looked up just in time to see Mike and Lisa simultaneously make "monster faces" (two fingers inserted on each side of the mouth, exposing most of one's teeth gnashing in the air) at the waiter! He hurriedly excused himself and vanished, not to be seen again while we were there. This was too funny! A waitress arrived, and they gave her the monster faces too, but she was more stalwart and bore it well (in the background we could hear other waiters trying hard not to bust a gut laughing). Every single time (against Mom's protests) the waitress came around, she got a faceful of teeth from both children!

And then, we were on the road again, fortified with the memory of the male waiter's face frozen in horror, stuttering wordlessly just before he disappeared. He had been so formal that it really was funny to see him lose his composure.

The first thing I remember of Idaho is stopping in Sandpoint. It seemed like a quiet, sleepy little timber town. The visitor center had a long log laid down as a border for the parking area, and we competed to see who could walk on it the farthest without losing their balanace. Not much was outside of Sandpoint past there. We drove through Elmira (such a tiny town it was hardly worth mentioning or posting a sign for) and found ourselves in what they called the town of Deep Creek. To me it just looked like a string of cheap motel-type cabins and a restaurant. The people here talked funny. They didn't call it "Deep Creek", it was "Dip Crick". All around were dark green forests, with the creek in the full rush of spring. The date was March 22nd, 1987.

Dennis had a lot of connections in the Deep Creek/Naples/Bonners Ferry areas. One of these connections owned the little string of motels and we moved into one of these motel rooms. We all crammed into one unit- three adults and four children. There were two beds, a bathroom, and possibly a small fridge. There was absolutely no privacy, so Kary and Mike and I wound up spending a good deal of time outdoors. Mom had gone on and on about how many garnets were on Idaho, and how one could find them simply lying on the ground, but also in creeks. Dennis had brought gold pans and boasted of how rich he would become, because he had secret methods for finding the gold. So you can imagine how optimistically we viewed the creek running past the door of our motel room! Garnets, there for the picking! Gold to be panned! If we found it, it would be ours to keep! We ran down to the edge of the creek and picked through all the pebbles and small stones we could reach. Any glittering fleck was gold or silver. Soon I got caught up in the beauty of the various rocks and forgot about the garnets, silver, and gold. They were beautiful in their own right. This might sound silly to a native Idahoan or other country dweller, but I had come from the concrete jungle of Chicago. I had never picked through the stones by a creek like this. I selected piles and piles of them and laid them on newspaper outside the door of the motel room. My siblings did the same, and pretty soon we were bickering over whose rocks were whose. Whenever there was an empty jar, I rinsed it out, filled it with rocks, and added water, because they were more colorful wet than dry.

Kary took me out to the fields nearby and decided it was time for me to learn how to play catch. At first I ran in terror when the baseball came hurtling in my direction. In Chicago, it had been dodgeball, and balls were weapons to be thrown forcefully at a victim's face. Kary was patient. He showed me how to use the glove, to meet the ball even as something in me was screaming to get out of the way, quick. After hours of this, we threw and caught the ball, back and forth, happily. Kary was good company, because he didn't talk too much, but had a quiet, strong presence. Even when he was in a bad mood, you knew he'd be there for you if you really needed him.

Kary took off a lot, hiking through the woods without us. Mike and I built forts together in the remains of a huge burn pile. There was a guy there named Tommy John who seemed always to be burning something. The pile was full of pliable, half burnt wire that was easy to use for binding sticks and boards together. Tommy John hardly spoke to us; mostly he concentrated on the burn pile. Another kid our age frequented the burn piles. He had a fascination with trains. A freight train ran past the burn pile several times a day, and he always knew roughly when it would be passing through and was there to see it.

In the motel room was a lot of squabbling and raw nerves. I was oblivious to quite a bit of it, except that our eating fare was extremely limited. We ate mostly ramen noodle soup made with hot water from the bathroom tap. My mom and Dennis shared one of the beds, my sisters the other. Kary, Mike and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor. I could have shared the bed, but preferred the personal space of the floor to a bed full of flailing limbs.

Dennis was frequently gone, once to a place that sounded like "Quarterlane", but I later learned was Couer d'Alene. They were looking for something, arguing about stuff, and I wasn't sure what, but suspected that they were seeking more permanent, roomy living quarters than the motel.