McCall Trip...07/08/11...5am...42°...Sunny

Left Joseph 6am July 7, 2011...arrived back home about 7pm...fast trip but seemed to be what I needed...

Hell's Canyon Overlook

Have been feeling like I wanted to go to Lake Fork, where I lived the most formative years of my life, age eight to eighteen...Maybe it was because of my past 50th class reunion, which I chose not to attend or because I'm writing stories about then or Memorial Day gone by...Don't really know...I love the drive over there even if it is long and full of corners!..Just for the day, not to see people especially or spend a lot of time, just drive, look and think...

Lots of nostalgia as we passed camping places, huckleberry patches, fishing and boating spots, cemetery, Grampa's place, and on up the long road to New Meadows where we lived 50 years ago when first married...Up the winding Goose Creek grade toward McCall, things flying through my mind so fast, things from 60 years ago when we followed a sanding truck the entire grade as Mom drove us home from a dental appointment in Council, in the dead of winter...or the many trips we made with a new baby up the grade to spend time with grandparents...Into McCall, the town that looks nothing like when I grew up...Passed the new high school, cemetery...on to the "ranch"...Left turn onto "Farm to Market" road, passed the spot where Wood Grove school sat, many years ago, long gone...Looked up on the hill where my Mom spent 13 years of her life after Daddy's death.

Followed Ashton lane over Boulder Creek, (the old swimming hole)..."Jug Handle Estates", as it is now called, our old ranch, broken up into five acre parcels, houses built in places where we farmed or rode horses checking on sheep and cows...Places where we picnicked, fished, went sledding, hunted for christmas trees and mushrooms and huckleberries...I was driving so took every road and lane as they serpentine back and forth almost meeting yourself coming and going...the road leading farther up the hill, more houses, farther than I had gone on horseback...Finally I left the maze of roads and houses.

Found the way out toward the familiar "Farm to Market" road and went south to Roseberry, where the old school house is gone, torn down, and another old school moved into its place, with a country store, museum and church added, a pioneer town in the making...More later