Annie Reed

Nearly twenty years ago now, I traveled to the Northern Idaho panhandle with a friend. We stayed for several days in the town of Sandpoint on the western edge of Lake Pend d’Oreille.

We mostly did touristy things, like going out for a boat ride on the lake. Fun, right? Except it was the choppiest boat ride I’ve ever been on in my life. Seriously. The waves were so rough they threw me out of my chair, and I spent some time inside the little cabin just to make sure I stayed on the boat. I did, however, discover even severe chop wasn’t enough to make me sick to my stomach.

Go me?

We also drove around the northern part of the lake to the small town of Hope, Idaho, where we had lunch on the outdoor deck of the second floor of a small restaurant that overlooked the lake. We walked around the few blocks of the main drag in Sandpoint, ate dinner at a fancy touristy restaurant, and stayed in a place that had a kitchen as well as a living room and two separate bedrooms.

My friend, who was much more politically savvy at the time than I was, warned me about the general political bent of residents in the area, as well as the towns to the south of Sandpoint. What I remember most about that trip though was the natural beauty of the lake and the surrounding area.

In the years since, I’ve written several stories in fictional settings based on the places I visited in Northern Idaho. My ghost story “The Four Thirty-Five” is one of them, inspired in large part by an afternoon spent doing nothing other than hanging out on the lakeshore, soaking in the sun. So is “After,” a gentle end of life story whose beginnings came to me while I was eating pizza on that second-story deck in Hope.

Blast From the Past, my Wiseguys novella that’s part of the current Unusual Heroes Storybundle, also traces its origins back to my trip to Idaho.

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