7. Priest Lake

            If I could run away from all my problems and forget the world it would probably be alone or with my boys. And I would go to Priest Lake, Idaho. It is a place where I forget all my anxieties and let them gradually go in little ripples into that calm, beautiful lake. At this place I can watch the skies change and see the light from the changing skies transform the look of the mountains with their endless forests—and all of that reflected in the lake. All of the history of the world with its constant fear of Ragnorak, Armageddon or Day of Doom melts like the winter snows from the Selkirks into the lake. I have no fears that the world might end because here I know that it’s all just part of the spheres on a small but very significant planet in a seemingly lifeless universe. What difference could all my menial problems be in the scheme of all of this?

            The shores of this lake have very few homes. It is remote from human traffic and here I can see my tiny place in a much bigger whole. Some 40 years ago I first came here a teenager. I was working for the Youth Conservation Corps with other kids from all across the state of Idaho. Our job was basic forestry sorts of things. As teenagers we were only allowed to work six hour days but during those days we maintained trails, thinned forests, mopped floors, put fire pits into campgrounds and cleaned outhouses. I made new friends, some of whom I still encounter all these years later. Together we worked as much to help others as to help ourselves because even all these years later those campgrounds are all still there and I can still go there to see all of the universe from a tiny little corner of the world.

            So Priest Lake is a place where I have always felt at peace with the world and humanity and I found it early in my life. Since then I have camped there in the rain with my wife and newborn son. Later I hiked to upper Priest with my son where we encountered a bear in the night and it destroyed my water bottle. I have taken my youngest son there and picked huckleberries and swam in the lake. I have hiked from the northern part of the lake to the Canadian border where the trees are cut away. The whole place is beautiful, isolated and forces you to forget the rest of the world. You have to protect your three year old from the bears, right? You have to build that fire to cook, right? No time to think about anything beyond the woods, lake and stars. Part of me thinks everyone should go to Priest Lake just to experience it and part of me just wishes no one but me knew about it. I think nearly everyone who has been there feels the same, so it is a place to be thankful for.