Fighting back by keeping smiles in the trenches

When it comes to the (not yet mandatory) directives to quarantine ourselves in Idaho I feel fairly lucky. In addition to my small house, I also have a shop which I heat with a large potbelly stove circa 1900; I purchased the very hungry, five-foot stove more than 50 years ago at an antique shop in Denver. It served me well in my cabin on 40 acres near Steamboat Springs for 25 years before I moved to Sandpoint 30 years ago.

At my age, my back will go out if I sit in a recliner more than two hours at a time. I thought it would take days, but in just under six hours on the first day I found I had sharpened all my tools, shovels and chain saws in addition to summerizing my lawnmower and hanging all my tools in order of size so my work bench is now clear.

Awakening early the next day, for the first time ever, all three of my fishing tackle boxes are now organized, even to the point of pre-tying two flies each to six foot tippets and wrapping them around a sponge so they will be instantly available for fly fishing. I have five at the ready. I then sharpened all my hooks and had time to polish two pair of brown leather hiking boots using black polish to cover up scratch marks and they instantly now look brand new (and more waterproof.)

It was only the third morning and temptation began to seep into my mind. Washington state has already forbidden fishing, but in Idaho boat launch sites are closed, but there is the Clark Fork River only one mile away and who would bother me if I was fishing alone?

It was rainy and I spent the day detailing all the dust collections in my house plus my interior windows. I will now reveal the result of hours searching for the best product to clean windows: hands down, it is Dawn dish soap. A few drops of that in a bucket of water is what even the professionals doing the outside windows of the Empire State Building use. Case closed.

The next day I performed the hardest task any one man can attempt to accomplish: I spent the day organizing all my paperwork and hundreds of notes, thoughts and ideas which I had written on about one thousand pieces of paper. It was more tiring than playing two rounds of golf on a hot humid day in August in Chicago. (Actually, it was a course in a fairly rich suburb and I was a caddie there for three summers, carrying two bags and doing what we called a “double loop” or a total of 36 holes.

On the fourth morning I elected to try surfing on my laptop and television, utilizing YouTube and my Kindle Firestick. Starting with no plan, I suddenly focused on the question of how many cowboy movies were filmed which never showed a cowboy using a bathroom or an outhouse.

After three hours of searching, I found a few Westerns in the ’80s where someone got shot or was shooting from within an outhouse. (I know, that and $1.50 will get me a cup of coffee if I don’t go to Starbucks.) My next goal will to find the first movie or TV show when blood (fake, of course) was actually shown when someone was shot.

I just saw another story about toilet paper hoarding and had to laugh because I am so old that I remember Sears’s catalogues arriving at our home four times a year. I wouldn’t want to test their absorbency, I thought. And then I remembered my grandfather relating that “You can only get three wipes from a corn cob. Don’t even think about going for a fourth.”

This, of course led me to laugh even more when I recalled we all have heard some version of the “grumpy, bad ass boss” who enters an on-site fiberglass outhouse and then the guy with the backhoe “accidently” knocks the whole thing over (door facing toward the ground) but the noise from heavy equipment machines is just a bit too loud for anyone to hear the boss’s screams for help.

I was a carpenter’s apprentice and knew how to keep my mouth shut in those days. (A lesson I learned a lot more profoundly in the Army serving in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.)

It is the next day and I am now approaching a project I have been putting off since I moved to Clark Fork 25 years ago. My “shop” is really a building measuring about 40 by 30 feet and is heated by both an antique woodstove and a potbelly stove. There are two layers of rug covering all the wooden floors (acquired for free from surplus scraps or lightly used at Sandpoint Furniture.

I previously had placed Styrofoam insulation in the walls of the structure, built in the early ’50s, but my true insulation comes from 2,000 books I have acquired for free and lugged across country. I worked for five years at a library and when I was told to take old books and old donated books to the dumpster, they never made it past my pickup truck.

The prospect of organizing fiction by authors’ last names is almost a pleasure compared to the 50% of non-fiction books I have hoarded which will require a close approximation of the Dewey Decimal System I learned while working at several libraries.

I have made the challenge. Now I will find out if I can accomplish this self-made goal.

JAMES RICHARD JOHNSON

Clark Fork