For its Independence Day issue Time magazine published an article for the 240th anniversary of our country. It had 240 things to be thankful for in the United States. I made up my own list to write about, so I thought I would them in this blog. Here is my first installment:

            1. Sometimes when that ice ball of anger and/or fear knots inside the center of my being, I go away to the Salmon River Canyon in the heart of Idaho either in reality or in my mind. There I let that ice explode and go out of my body into storm clouds that I can see in the water dogs nestled in the trees on the side of the canyon walls, I can feel in the cool streams and river flowing through the rocks and crevices, and I hear it in the rushing water falls of a Lightening Creek or an Alison Creek or the Ruby Rapids. The scent of sun soaked sand on the bars cleanses all the negative emotions and there I can just breathe. There is not so much sky to overwhelm and make me feel vulnerable to attack, but just enough to know the beauty of forever.

            Those hills are the ones I have always taken comfort in and where I lose any reason for fear or anger. As a boy I would climb up the hills and lose myself in trees or run through the grasses, sometimes stepping on cactus, startle grouse—no, they would startle me—and feel the freedom of being alive.

            The canyon carves itself from the Bitterroots to the Seven Devils Mountains, gouged North from the Bitterroots then carving itself west between the Clearwater and Salmon River mountains of the Idaho Batholith, again it turns North abruptly upon meeting the Seven Devils. Its waters are from the largest wilderness in the continental U.S. and only two highways have dared to intersect its sanctuary. Few people inhabit its hollows and I count myself blessed to have ever been one of them. It is my sanctuary from the stress that balls into my being from the cacophony of the world.