The Old School Adventure (Part One)
September 2012
By Pat McManus
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When I was six and seven years old, I attended a tiny one-room log cabin school located far back in the woods and mountains of North Idaho. My mother was the teacher, and she flunked me in second grade. We found my second-grade report card a while back, and under the section that asked “Reason for Failure,” Mom had written, “Too many absences.” The size of this accomplishment may go unappreciated if you don’t realize that I lived at the school. It was enormous, the accomplishment I mean. Some of the fault may have been my mother’s because she allowed me to run wild while she focused her attention on the other seven or eight students.
The school was tucked away in a V formed by the confluence of two streams, the West Branch of Priest River and Goose Creek, both of which ran through the Squaw Valley of Idaho, an area now surrounded by thick forests, a swamp, and on the northern edge of the tiny site, a mountain. It was the perfect place for a seven-year-old boy to run wild. The two years I lived at the school shaped my entire character and life. If a single characteristic has motivated me over my 79 years, it has been an unrelenting and overpowering quest for freedom. I think that has been the magnet that drew me back to the site of the school twice over the years, the last time, this summer.
This summer’s adventure team led by me consisted of my daughter Shannon, who came down from Vancouver, Canada where she is a librarian, my daughter Kelly, who lives in Spokane and runs our website, and my grandson Jacob, who had expressed an interest in accompanying me into the site to test his metal detector.
I think part of this interest in my quest for adventure may have been stimulated by my wife, who clearly is of the opinion I was getting much too old for such an undertaking (a rather unfortunate word, if occurs to me now). Okay, okay, so sometimes Bun gets it right!
Back in the days when I occasionally attended first and second grade, the countryside was fairly open. The area had been burned over by the great fires of 1910 and logged out prior to the fires, with the result that you could see considerable distances through the new-growth forests. Those forests are now thick with growth and full of huge trees. The Forest Service, on whose land the school rested, had burned down the one-room structure many years ago, so the formidable goal of us four adventurers was to find that tiny flat clear area in the middle of these thick and towering forests.
Let me describe the features for which we hoped to identify the site. The tiny school had faced a mountain that reared up a few feet from the front door and what might laughingly be referred to as “the school yard.” In reality that mountain was part of my play area. It had an old logging road running along the edge of it a few yards up from the school. Several hundred yards up this road was a slab-wood cabin occupied by a man known only, I recall, as “the Old Woodcutter,” apparently because everywhere he went he carried a double-bitted ax over his shoulder. Anyone with any sense avoided that cabin, and I had plenty sense of that sort. So my range was limited. A pack of wolves also resided on the mountain. Wolves have a way of sharpening the senses of even a young and adventuresome boy to a very keen level. Between the wolves and the Old Woodcutter, my playground was fairly limited.
As the four of us adventurers — Shan, Kelly, Jake, and me — faced the massive forest and the mountain rising up near a creek, which seemed to me to be flowing in the wrong direction, I detected what appeared to be signs of an old road running along the edge of the mountain.
I led the way in along it, ignoring the yelps and snarls of those following behind me. The road, if that’s what it was, had hundred-foot trees growing in the middle of it, not a good sign. But after no more than half an hour of fighting our way over downed timber and through conquering brush higher than our heads, I looked down and there below us was a tiny flat area with a creek winding around it. We had found the site of the old school! The second installment of this adventure will appear next month, and if you wait with bated breath, please don’t stand too close to me.